Suspending the Election

[Worgen]

So either vote for Democrats and get a tiny bit of harm reduction (while signaling to Democrats that you're going to be willing to accept their crumbs so they have no reason to change and actually have to fight to fix things and risk pissing off their Corporate Overlords) or you vote Third Party (which, as much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, is not something that is ever going to work until there is some major change in politics but that major change has to come from the two parties that gain nothing and potentially lose everything to make these changes so yeah, that'll never happen. I'm not brainwashed enough to use the "A vote for Third Party is a vote for Trump!" bullshit but I do recognize that voting Third Party does hurt The Democrats chances).

Or you keep voting for democrats so republicans don't get in and scrap any climate change measures we have taken and it has to be rebuilt by the next democratic president while hoping that the republicans haven't taken part of congress so any deals still have to be negotiated with them.

 

[Revnak]

Genuine question: Do you think any Presidential candidate, regardless of political party or independent status, could publicly come out with the above and stand any chance of getting elected in the US?

No and that is precisely why our Democracy is utterly doomed.

 

[Agema]

Or you keep voting for democrats so republicans don't get in and scrap any climate change measures we have taken and it has to be rebuilt by the next democratic president while hoping that the republicans haven't taken part of congress so any deals still have to be negotiated with wholesale blocked by them.

Fixed that for you

 

[Worgen]

Fixed that for you

True.

 

[Seanchaidh]

And the human cost of that economic growth was staggering, even if we use the callous metrics of capitalism. I've got plenty of respect for what the USSR accomplished in the 20's and 30's, but it is intrinsically linked to Stalinist terror and the great purges. That was the only way to keep an increasingly discontent population to stay on board with the massive social upheaval that the collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization of cities required. When you forcefully displace something like a quarter of your population from small villages to rapidly erected industrial cities, you can't avoid civil unrest.

They compressed a few hundred years of industrial development into a decade or two. If we compare with the west, we've got the UK and its global empire of the 1700s and 1800s with all its many abuses of foreign populations and the rather poor conditions in coal mines, strikebreaking, and so on. United States with its chattel slavery and stolen continent-- and poor conditions in coal mines, textile sweatshops, strikebreaking and so on.

The leadership of the Soviet Union might have contented themselves with a less destructive sort of development, but then they would have almost certainly been run over by some collection of fascist/capitalist forces subsequently; which is much more a critique of global capitalism than less destructive forms of economic development. The fact that a Paris commune or revolutionary Catalonia gets forcibly put down is not as much of an indictment of them as those that did the putting down-- and yet those examples still didn't survive. The Soviet Union did. Arguably historical circumstances require a certain amount of brutality from those that would try to rise to the position of global power when working from the position of an agrarian society with no modern industrial means of production. The story of Japan's relatively rapid industrialization is not exactly without political repression either. And the Soviet Union was not likely to survive long without becoming a global power.

 

[Gergar12]

The reason Republicans don't want it is because they are afraid democrats may do the same thing later on. The military is against it because of institutions, and norms. He can't do it. Now had he done this smarter, and mentioned/put Covid-19 at the forefront, and say for the safety of my fellow Americans I won't hold an election. He may have had a higher rate of success in doing it, but he had to screw it up and mention voter fraud which is a nonissue, and imply he is afraid of losing the election.

 

[Dalisclock]

The reason Republicans don't want it is because they are afraid democrats may do the same thing later on. The military is against it because of institutions, and norms. He can't do it. Now had he done this smarter, and mentioned/put Covid-19 at the forefront, and say for the safety of my fellow Americans I won't hold an election. He may have had a higher rate of success in doing it, but he had to screw it up and mention voter fraud which is a nonissue, and imply he is afraid of losing the election.

Well, trying to use COVID 19 as an excuse would admit it is a really big deal, and he's been trying to downplay it for half a year at this point. Not that it would phase his followers but everyone else would see through it.

Granted, most people apparently have caught on to his craptacular non-response to the issue and now there's apparently reports that there was talk of a national response, but it was kibashed because it was hitting blue states hard "They'll blame their governors for it".

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”

This spring, a team working under the president’s son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?

www.vanityfair.com

I have no clue just how useful Vanity Fair is as a source for this but this sounds exactly like something this administration would do, considering the broad contempt Trump seems to have for Democrats and Blue states in general.

 

[SupahEwok]

They compressed a few hundred years of industrial development into a decade or two. If we compare with the west, we've got the UK and its global empire of the 1700s and 1800s with all its many abuses of foreign populations and the rather poor conditions in coal mines, strikebreaking, and so on. United States with its chattel slavery and stolen continent-- and poor conditions in coal mines, textile sweatshops, strikebreaking and so on.

The leadership of the Soviet Union might have contented themselves with a less destructive sort of development, but then they would have almost certainly been run over by some collection of fascist/capitalist forces subsequently; which is much more a critique of global capitalism than less destructive forms of economic development. The fact that a Paris commune or revolutionary Catalonia gets forcibly put down is not as much of an indictment of them as those that did the putting down-- and yet those examples still didn't survive. The Soviet Union did. Arguably historical circumstances require a certain amount of brutality from those that would try to rise to the position of global power when working from the position of an agrarian society with no modern industrial means of production. The story of Japan's relatively rapid industrialization is not exactly without political repression either. And the Soviet Union was not likely to survive long without becoming a global power.

You know, I'd heard of communist apologetics for genocide in the name of defense for their ideology, but I've not quite seen it this brazen before.

 

[Worgen]

You know, I'd heard of communist apologetics for genocide in the name of defense for their ideology, but I've not quite seen it this brazen before.

Him being a straight up tankie would certainly explain some things.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

You know, I'd heard of communist apologetics for genocide in the name of defense for their ideology, but I've not quite seen it this brazen before.

Spoiler: More Communism memes

 

[Revnak]

You know, I'd heard of communist apologetics for genocide in the name of defense for their ideology, but I've not quite seen it this brazen before.

I don’t know if preferring the Soviet Union’s method of industrialization to that of the US or Britain is apologetics per se, but the rest of the argument framing their brutality as necessary is idiotic.

 

[09philj]

You know, I'd heard of communist apologetics for genocide in the name of defense for their ideology, but I've not quite seen it this brazen before.

I don’t know if preferring the Soviet Union’s method of industrialization to that of the US or Britain is apologetics per se, but the rest of the argument framing their brutality as necessary is idiotic.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which"

 

[Seanchaidh]

I don’t know if preferring the Soviet Union’s method of industrialization to that of the US or Britain is apologetics per se, but the rest of the argument framing their brutality as necessary is idiotic.

It was also explicitly a premise of what I was responding to: "That was the only way to keep an increasingly discontent population to stay on board with the massive social upheaval that the collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization of cities required. When you forcefully displace something like a quarter of your population from small villages to rapidly erected industrial cities, you can't avoid civil unrest."

In any case, I think you may be conflating two very different senses of 'necessary'. 'Necessary to quickly achieve the level of production that allowed the Soviet Union to take on Nazi Germany blow for blow' is not the same as 'necessary to implement an economic model' or 'necessary to maintain short-term stability'. The Soviet Union was invaded by a coalition of capitalist countries during the civil war in which it came to power. That obviously had a huge impact on their decisions from then on. And the quite frankly ludicrous degree to which they focused on expanding their productive capacity and military readiness may well have been decisive to the outcome of World War 2.

 

[Revnak]

It was also explicitly a premise of what I was responding to: "That was the only way to keep an increasingly discontent population to stay on board with the massive social upheaval that the collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization of cities required. When you forcefully displace something like a quarter of your population from small villages to rapidly erected industrial cities, you can't avoid civil unrest."

In any case, I think you may be conflating two very different senses of 'necessary'. 'Necessary to quickly achieve the level of production that allowed the Soviet Union to take on Nazi Germany blow for blow' is not the same as 'necessary to implement an economic model' or 'necessary to maintain short-term stability'. The Soviet Union was invaded by a coalition of capitalist countries during the civil war in which it came to power. That obviously had a huge impact on their decisions from then on. And the quite frankly ludicrous degree to which they focused on expanding their productive capacity and military readiness may well have been decisive to the outcome of World War 2.

Now, I’m no fan of Ukrainians. I am in fact explicitly anti-Ukrainian. Very opposed to the very idea of anyone choosing to identify as Ukrainian. So, with that full context, I also don’t think they deserved a manufactured famine because Stalin thought they were too disloyal. The jailing all the uppity Jews and doctors was also extremely unwise superstitious Georgian nonsense. And when one is leveling criticisms of the Soviet Union from a leftist perspective, this is usually what they mean, not that they actually dared to fight in a civil war rather than die in the streets. Thus my specific wording. You don’t have to starve a few million Ukrainians to industrialize. Most other countries did not manufacture famines as part of the move to industrial agricultural techniques, and there are absolutely ways of implementing those alongside collectivization without killing millions of... well, innocent is the wrong word to describe Ukrainians, but at least mostly innocent Ukrainians.

Also Lysenko should’ve been executed rather than allowed to spread his nonsense around for propaganda purposes, leading to similar but arguably less intentional famines in China.

 

[deleted20220709]

DELETED

 

[Hawki]

You know what the UK and the USA never did? Explicit genocide.

Um...

When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’ | HISTORY

By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained

www.history.com

Black War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

We can debate whether the USSR did a 'worse' genocide, and a lot of death in the Americas and Australia can be attributed to disease (about 90% in the case of the former), but there were certainly elements of intended genocide in both cases. You don't have to look far to see people calling for extermination, and in the case of Tasmania...well, let's just say there's a reason that the only Aboriginal Tasmanians these days are of mixed ancestry.

But as others have said, it is pretty cool to see full on communist atrocity excusal on open display.

I actually agree here though. Though if I'm playing devil's advocate, people do make similar excuses for capitalism (e.g. "crony capitalism").

 

[deleted20220709]

DELETED

 

[Buyetyen]

Shit, I actually forgot about the Black War. That's entirely on me. So let me amend my previous statement by saying that what the UK and US did in no way excuses shit done by the USSR or vice versa. Genocide is bad (never thought I'd have to write that) and two wrongs doesn't make a right.

Sadly, my countrymen did not rely on that excuse until relatively recently. Americans back then and a lot of us still had a might-makes-right attitude. "If the Natives keep losing fights to us, it must be because it's God will that we conquer and civilize this land."

And let us not forget what Andrew Jackson said after the SCOTUS told him he couldn't commit the atrocity we would later call the Trail of Tears: "The courts have made their decision. Now let them enforce it."

 

[Seanchaidh]

But as others have said, it is pretty cool to see full on communist atrocity excusal on open display.

You called "Stalinist terror and the great purges" necessary to keep people on board with the Soviet rapid industrialization. 'Stalinist terror' describes quite a wide variety of political repression. And since you said it was necessary, I assumed you were talking about the stuff that one might reasonably describe as necessary to the effort to industrialize and collectivize agriculture. Because you, who are hardly an apologist for Stalin, said it was necessary.

And the human cost of that economic growth was staggering, even if we use the callous metrics of capitalism. I've got plenty of respect for what the USSR accomplished in the 20's and 30's, but it is intrinsically linked to Stalinist terror and the great purges. That was the only way to keep an increasingly discontent population to stay on board with the massive social upheaval that the collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization of cities required. When you forcefully displace something like a quarter of your population from small villages to rapidly erected industrial cities, you can't avoid civil unrest.

Now maybe I'm just stupid but I don't see how a famine, intentional or otherwise, is helping people to stay on board with massive upheaval. Dekulakization (not to be confused with decossackization)? Sure. That's not the famine. And it's also not genocide.

And which forces would that be?

Perhaps the group of nations that caused them over sixteen million premature deaths during world war 2? And would have conquered a substantially weaker Soviet Union? That ring a bell?

Or maybe it would be the state whose intelligence agencies foment coups all over the globe whenever someone brown dares to utter the phrase 'minimum wage increase' to this day.

You don’t have to starve a few million Ukrainians to industrialize.

True!

 

[tstorm823]

And this is the balancing act of the Democrats. Do enough that progressives trust you are working on a progressive agenda but not more than moderates or conservative centrists can support. Meanwhile you need to do something because if you don't and try to court conservatives too hard the progressives will become apathetic to your policies and bow out.

You make that sound like a careful and deliberate policy balance. It isn't. The policies of the Democratic Party, with few exceptions, are essentially just writing whatever the status quo is down into law. The only balancing act is in the messaging, telling one group of people that the changes in the law are progress while telling the other that the changes in the world they're based on aren't a big deal.