Your electoral arguments are all empty rhetoric. Not one of them is based on reality

Since Occupy, what success has there been at carving out a space for leftists within the Democratic party? Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and Jamaal Bowman. AOC couldn’t be brought to call the genocide in Gaza a genocide until a few months before the ceasefire, and her support of Biden until the last minute just shows that she’s a lot more concerned with her personal career than doing her job as a “progressive” (meaningless term! and she still can’t live up to it). Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman were better at running opposition against the genocide but still were trapped within a party that is beholden to corporate interests more than anything else, so it was only Tlaib that ever actually said anything directly to Netanyahu. And all of this is just symbolic actions, because they’re powerless. To make matters worse, these are your most “progressive” figures in congress, and they’ll still bend the knee on every other foreign policy issue: they’ll go along with the Uyghur genocide claims, call Maduro a dictator, say almost nothing about the Cuban embargo unless Trump just put them back on the list (gotta #resist queens!), support regime change in Iran, etc etc. So there is no left in the Democratic party, there are only some figureheads that make “progressive” Americans feel like their job is done when they don’t represent any kind of threat or hold any kind of power. It’s an illusion, and you’d be much better off without these clowns at all so that regular Americans didn’t falsely believe they had someone in there fighting for them when the truth is they’re 100% on their own until they pick up a gun and join a union.

It’s not a strategy that will ever lead anywhere. The Democratic party is the death of any kind of leftward movement, and it is specifically designed to work this way. You’ll never change it from the inside, and every bit of effort you spend trying to reform it because it’s the “better strategy” would be better spent on building parallel power structures: unions that are independent from either major party, communist parties, mutual aid orgs, community defense orgs in minority communities, bail funds, etc. Because those things won’t win elections but they will create the conditions under which transformative change can take place. I would hope that the genocide in Gaza should illustrate the necessity for abandoning the Democratic party and adopting an entirely different strategy.

This attitude is exactly why nothing will be achieved in electoral politics and Americans will only get to know freedom when the rest of the world imposes it on you. If the blatantly antidemocratic actions undertaken by the Harris campaign still have you undyingly loyal to this party, you’ll stand by them even after they shoot your mother and run your dog over.

If I’m trying to make a point, I try to substantiate it with evidence, not just generalizing about how I imagine the conversation is going to go. I’ve never talked with anyone from the USSR, but have known some from Cuba (as well as researchers who’ve worked there for an interval). There’s some variety in the perspectives, some are more negative, but there’s a clear throughline: even where the state takes a repressive position, these socialist countries are miles ahead of their comparable Western counterparts in all areas of social development. There’s a reason that after the fall of the USSR, there was a marked decrease in women’s rights, acceptance of queer people, and the safety of ethnic or racial minorities in the region. We can talk about the USSR’s shortcomings at serving these groups’ needs, but the myth of the USSR as a monolithic, socially conservative “redfash” state is laughable. It is simply untrue and any conversation with people who resided in the USSR or any socialist state, or just picking up a book by someone who isn’t sponsored by the Victims of Communism organization, should show that these minorities have benefitted from the proactive socialist state’s initiatives for their benefit much more than they’ve been held back by certain missteps (to be clear, there have been missteps).

I wanna add that the way I formulated it is incomplete, or at least too partial to the functional perspective that someone who wishes to preserve the status quo would have. Obviously trans people don’t just “choose” their gender, it’s much more complicated than that. But I think it’s worth looking at things from this lens to understand why the billionaires in particular are recalcitrant about gender.

Gender is a load bearing brainworm for capitalist society. Capitalists need stratification, having a gradient of various degrees of precariousness for workers to experience that would push them into accepting a worse deal for selling their labor. Gender is clearly one of the primary ways to achieve this: an absolutely incredible amount of domestic labor is performed without compensation by women every day, and society would fall apart if it wasn’t. The rigid structure of the patriarchy is a key feature of this system, which means that trans people represent a clear break in that logic; if AFAB individuals can just choose not to be subjected to gender-based exploitation, it starts to rip the whole thing apart. Equally, transfeminine people represent another break in the opposite direction. The patriarchy is more or less incompatible with the existence of trans people, at least without significantly transforming itself.

The students in Tiananmen Square did get exactly what they deserved. A safe evacuation after the fighting in the streets surrounding the square got too intense.

Black people started using the n word among themselves casually, doesn’t mean other people can just copy it and shield themselves from accusations of racism by saying Black people were doing it first.

What did you watch, Innuendo Studios’ How to Radicalize a Normie series or something? I find it kinda funny that you’re being so vague about what exactly it is that bothers you about ‘tankies’ as opposed to other leftists because I’m pretty sure a lot of the people you’re arguing with aren’t Marxist-Leninists or anything. It’s giving shadowboxing vibes.

A tankie is literally someone who believes in authoritarian communism

How could you achieve communism or socialism without authoritarianism? Do you believe in revolution? Is a revolution not the most authoritarian process imaginable, the forced imposition of a new reality by one class unto another?

can you explain what you actually disagree with? and are the tactics in question just using wojaks and being a little rude sometimes?

Buddy you’re the one comparing my personal friend Xi Jinping to a yellow bear, how do you not see how close to blackface that is

Dutch guy getting beat up after doing blackface: “Waah! It’s a important cultural practice! You don’t understand, it has nothing to do with race, Dutch people just have folklore stories about dark skinned fantasy creatures coming and stealing our stuff! You’re the ones making it about race!”

Hey that’s not true at all, the whole world has seen those atrocious AI ads about how they’re putting more cops on the street!

How is it not progressive when a Hamas fighter blows up an IDF tank? Is there something qualitatively different about the way Hamas fights the occupiers and some other, more progressive group, would be fighting the IDF? And if the difference is not in how they fight but how they govern, why should it matter at all how they govern when Gaza has been completely disintegrated and there is no operating governmental structure anyway so even if Hamas were cartoonish Islamist terrorists like ISIS they wouldn’t even have the ability to control anyone. If there’s a Palestinian organization that’s worth criticizing because they’re misusing their power, it’s not Hamas, it’s Fatah.

(but not a fascist one)

I have some bad news about the party that great numbers of early West German government figures belonged to

You’re mostly correct except Russia obviously doesn’t want to annex Ukraine, only the majority Russian parts that have been treated as second class citizens by Ukraine’s nazi government. If they annexed all of it, they’d only create larger problems for themselves in the borders with NATO members; keeping Ukraine neutral is the whole point (and is beneficial for everyone except arms dealers as you pointed out)

If you were alive in the Cuban missile crisis you’d be saying some wild stuff like “Turkey NEEDED those nukes!”

If you never leave the online world then the only oppression you can know is being called mean words. That’s the only way these people can justify what they’re saying. Dang, someone called you a cissy and you don’t get a little ‘straight’ title in a game? Awesome! Hope this brutal oppression keeps going!

Look, just phrasing any of this in terms of ‘biological males’ indicates his knowledge of the transgender rights movement is very outdated (use the term Assigned Male at Birth! gender isn’t biological and sex doesn’t work like that!) or he’s using explicitly transphobic terminology. Either way, it reflects that he holds a position that trans people and their advocates are 100% in the right to revoke support over. AOC will always take any opportunity to attack the Greens, she’s an opportunist. That doesn’t mean that what he said is acceptable.