"Do something!" Michelle Obama's big-hearted, urgent, barn-burner of a convention speech

I went and looked up definitions of ‘oligarch’ to make sure I didn’t misspeak. Nearly everything I found lines up perfectly with the point I was expressing.

Your focus on motivations isn’t a useful way to evaluate figures like the Obamas. It doesn’t matter what’s in their hearts, only their actions. What difference do their beliefs make, if their actions are harmful?

Obama’s entire administration was filled to the brim with actions and inactions that had the effect of protecting and preserving entrenched power structures. Here’s several examples:

Obama chose to let the individuals and organizations directly responsible for the 2008 economic collapse to avoid criminal accountability. Obama massively increased the use of lethal unmanned drones and instituted a policy of retroactively classifying civilians killed by them as combatants because of those individuals proximity to the resulting explosions. Obama sacrificed the Supreme Court seat that would lead to Roe’s overturning by choosing to not challenge McConnell’s unprecedented months long stalling. Michelle Obama’s misguided “when they go low, we go high” sentiment perfectly characterized the ineffective, elitist political strategy that enabled trump to win in ‘16. I can go on and on with examples.

Made sense to me. "DO SOMETHING!"

Like what?

It gets the crowd fired up without providing any productive outlet for that energy.

Barak appealed to our shared humanity. As a trans woman, he asked me to understand the views of people that wish I was dead.

Maybe it's good politics, but I don't have to like it.

By oligarch, I am referring to a small, exclusive group of rulers that hoard power.

I have already said that their ‘sincerity’ is irrelevant to my point and a useless way to assess people like this.

To address the specific examples I raised:

Providing legal cover to white collar criminals protects the ruling class that Obama served as president.

Crafting the legal framework to indiscriminately kill civilians protects the enforcement mechanism that the ruling class needs to project power.

Failing to defend an open Supreme Court seat opened the door to removing rights to bodily autonomy and moved us closer to a theocratic autocracy.

Celebrating a strategy of rhetorical weakness against racists and fascist, made it easier for them to win the White House in 2016.

Do you have anything to support your assertions, or was this just some pedantic, contrarian troll posting?

This. Cornel west and Jill Stein are not options in this. If you live in a safely blue state, go ahead vote your heart out.

But just know that there is no scenario where West or Stein win. If that doesn't happen and Trump wins, we will not have another election. Trump is literally going to put the most evil anti democracy zealots into very powerful roles. And with a Republican scotus, we will be fucked. That is the outcome here. So you can be pragmatic or vote your conscience but the risk is that we will be fucked.

If there's one thing that 2016/2020 should have taught us is; presidential elections matter not just because of who is leading the country but who is selecting judges and filling very important roles in the government. Ultimately, our lesson should be that things can always get worse.

Yeah, that’s basically what they want. They are fine with the new rabid brand of GOP fascism ruining the country and the western world.

Many of these people are the ones who chant “death to America.” They just want to burn it down on the chance that something better might replace it someday in the future. Never mind the fascism and death that would result in the meantime. They’re not shy of violence anyway, but it’d be easier for them if it’s someone else doing it. It’s why they support leaders like Putin and Kim - they may be objectively shit, but they’re against the west, so…

The naive idealism is just a means to manipulate otherwise well-meaning people into supporting their cause. I don’t like choosing the lesser evil either, but when full-blown fascism is on the ballot, along with even worse outcomes for Palestinians, it’s obvious what needs to be done.

If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hotdogs

Lmao I've never heard this saying before, love it

Point to where I said I would support trump

They're an .ml, of course they want the full fascist dictatorship in America. They want their preferred economic system, state capitalism under authoritarian management, to gain influence globally.

I'm not that guy, but my two cents:

Both the fascists and the communists want to overturn the liberal system, it's about the only thing they actually genuinely agree on. Fortunately the actual full-on seize-the-means-of-production sorts are a vanishingly tiny percentage of the American population, and the two factions are otherwise completely antithetical to each other, with fascism being pure hierarchy and communism being no hierarchy. Liberalism in all its forms sits between these two extremes.

Lemmy, being international and non-corporate, is a small hub for the community though, with .ml (the more moderate ones) and .grad (the full-on tankies) being their homes.

I'm generally not worried about them. They know full well the fascists would literally try to eradicate them, that's a primary component of fascist philosophy going back to Hitler. They also won't be able to gain much of a foothold in the US until they can demonstrate a large-scale example of success somewhere, which is difficult when even China of all places has moved away from communist economic principles in recent decades. They will never stop hating liberals unfortunately, since we're clearly not communist and stand in their way. We at least permit them to exist though, when there's no McCarthyites running things anyway.

I'm not the one supporting blue or red fascists

If liberals want our vote then they need to provide better options with candidates that will earn our vote, and not demand it. But the better option would be for liberals to abandon their party which keeps shifting further and further to the right and embraise other options