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On December 04 2021 22:08 farvacola wrote:
You have cause for concern, no doubt, but even if SCOTUS overrules Roe, the rights at issue in Obergefell and Lawrence don’t just go away. They may be the subject of future litigation, but there’s nowhere near the interest and fervor the way there is with abortion. Make absolutely no mistake, the moment Republicans win Roe vs Wade they will move their sights to the next thing. They won't settle with 'only' outlawing abortions.
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On December 04 2021 22:11 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2021 22:08 farvacola wrote:
You have cause for concern, no doubt, but even if SCOTUS overrules Roe, the rights at issue in Obergefell and Lawrence don’t just go away. They may be the subject of future litigation, but there’s nowhere near the interest and fervor the way there is with abortion. Make absolutely no mistake, the moment Republicans win Roe vs Wade they will move their sights to the next thing. They won't settle with 'only' outlawing abortions.
Exactly. They are fighting a culture war. They will not simply decide they have won when they took away womens rights. They need their next goal to keep the votes coming in to keep the grift going.
The US is indeed looking very scary right now. Republicans will win the next election and just keep going more and more fascist.
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Of course they’ll keep pushing their hateful nonsense, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed (or that they’d even actually want to).
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I mean, they do have the Supreme Court, theres nothing Democrats are going to do to change that, and the Supreme Court is hardly beholden to public opinion like an elected official is. Seems like a prime situation to get rid of things like gay rights of all varieties, especially with the probable Republican takeover of Congress in 2022.
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On December 04 2021 22:34 farvacola wrote:
Of course they’ll keep pushing their hateful nonsense, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed (or that they’d even actually want to).
This were a lot more reassuring if they were not currently pushing for one of their hateful things and apparently succeeding. It feels a bit naive to assume that they will just stop.
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On December 04 2021 22:34 farvacola wrote:
Of course they’ll keep pushing their hateful nonsense, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed (or that they’d even actually want to). The problem with 'they might not succeed' is that for someone that is potentially effected its going to keep you up at night and 'you might be ok' is not going to make them feel better.
If your LGBTQ or just a women wanting to be able to have an abortion you don't want to live in the USA.
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It’s easy to forget that Roe, like many SCOTUS decisions, is about the power of individual states to pass and enforce certain laws, so its overturning will further harden the divide between so called red and blue states rather than categorically change rights across the country. And my point is not to suggest further bad shit won’t happen, rather that these are the tentative potential outcomes of future fights and as someone marginally involved in some of them, I’d rather keep fighting than join loser brain lefties in waving white flags before the time comes. I would never hold a retreat against someone worried about their rights, but these sweeping sentiments about the whole of the messed up USA are not useful or accurate. Roe isn’t even off the books yet and it’s simply a bad idea to overdetermine the consequences given how much of a watershed moment its overturning will be. For example, a lot of businesses have bet millions if not billions on Roe being safe, and there won’t be some orderly response to its departure, the consequences will be legion and difficult to predict.
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Northern Ireland27209 Posts
Aside from other impediments, I wonder if the GOP might prefer to just demonise various groups in perpetuity. If you actually get to implement banning the aberrant behaviours you’ve railed against for decades, how do you galvanise your base?
I suppose there’s always some new scapegoat around the corner.
Happy cake day Farv, and many sympathies to you plasmid. Can’t imagine what a cultural hate machine and looming attempts to legalise discrimination against one’s identity feels like. I’m assuming most of us here are in a similar boat
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Yeah but if you demonize them and actually fuck with their lives you can rile them up, make them fight for them freedoms via protesting, rioting, etc. and then you can paint them super unsympathetic and boths-sides it up.
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With Breyer not retiring while Democrats are in control of everything, it means Republicans have a good chance to end up with an indefinite 7-2 majority in the Supreme Court, control of the House, Senate and Presidency under Trump (the betting favorite for winning the general election currently) by 2024.
Republicans irrefutably don't have a majority of voter support, but they may very well seize control of every branch of government (including a majority of governors, states [Senates & Houses] as well as counties) while being led by the single most petulantly incompetent and disfavored president in history.
Despite that, Democrats are going to, in all seriousness, tell people they need to vote more and have lower expectations of the centrists they do manage to elect (despite increasingly losing voting access), since they are not the Republican megalomaniac supervillains they ran against.
For all their ineffectualness, they do serve as reliably placable allies to Republicans in squashing/obstructing anything marginally left of "Third Way" neoliberal imperialism and generally ushering the country to the right.
EDIT:
I’d rather keep fighting than join loser brain lefties in waving white flags before the time comes.
Lest I be confused for one of those "loser brain lefties", let me be clear, I absolutely think fighting is the only defensible choice. I just don't for a second accept neoliberal electoralism as fighting in any serious capacity.
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Thanks and cheers, WombaT!
For what my take is worth, we’re in territory somewhat similar to that which led to the dissolution of the Whigs, which is to say the impotence of Democrats and the hateful garbage pushed by Republicans may finally lead to a shakeup of the party system, which won’t be pretty, but is still cause for hope.
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I dont think we can separate from these two parties, imo. They're too entrenched as actual identities, I think we're more likely to see riots, looting, and general violence than any meaningful change in how the parties are operating (at least until the violence catches up to their gated communities.)
I still wish (dare I say hope?) for mass striking because thats the only thing short of violence that could affect the people who own the political system. Even then, theres no way strikes happen without corporations going all Gilded Age on people, so violence is totally unavoidable in at least some capacity. Society is due for a rearrangement, and I'm not sure how pretty thats going to be given the way things are now.
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I dunno, protests and strikes are inherently hopeful to me despite their potential for violence. The destabilization of the middle ground caused by events like the overturning of Roe is precisely what wealth and power have sought to avoid, which is, again, cause for optimism.
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I don’t think the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v Wade if wealth and power were trying to avoid it though, which may be its saving grace, really. Could certainly all just be performative, keep peoples attention of of any and all heinous disgusting pro corporate law they’re deciding.
And I agree that the potential for violence doesn’t diminish the capacity for hope from riots and the like, at the same time though, many people out there would rather let things dissolve if it all happened semi-“peace”fully. So I worry about how much violence is going to actually wind up happening given the appetite for passivity and apathy.
Sooner the better though, imo, I think it’s better to get a taste of revolution and learn the lesson early before it becomes a full course meal of destruction. Let them feel the flames lick their feels else everyone’s gonna get bathed in fire.
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It's a mistake to presume that actors like Supreme Court justices make choices as though they're beholden to some command-based structure where they take orders from wealth and power. That's a fallacy that I would summarize as Leftism's tendency to overdetermine the uniformity of power's constituency, especially in the face of an apparent Rightwing victory. Power doesn't beget itself via the neat cooperation of powerful entities, rather it is an emergent, iterative quality of a particular set of circumstances that, as a practical matter, include a ton of behind the scenes squabbling and fighting among power's claimants. I recommend the show Succession because it does a fairly good job of showing that off, but the idea that the powerful are powerful in part because of how they fight and cheat each other goes back to the times of Machiavelli. Said another way, there's an element of complexity at stake in any analysis of politics that often goes unaccounted for where folks are eager for neat and tidy theories of how things got to where they are and where they are going.
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Northern Ireland27209 Posts
On December 05 2021 02:27 farvacola wrote:
It's a mistake to presume that actors like Supreme Court justices make choices as though they're beholden to some command-based structure where they take orders from wealth and power. That's a fallacy that I would summarize as Leftism's tendency to overdetermine the uniformity of power's constituency, especially in the face of an apparent Rightwing victory. Power doesn't beget itself via the neat cooperation of powerful entities, rather it is an emergent, iterative quality of a particular set of circumstances that, as a practical matter, include a ton of behind the scenes squabbling and fighting among power's claimants. I recommend the show Succession because it does a fairly good job of showing that off, but the idea that the powerful are powerful in part because of how they fight and cheat each other goes back to the times of Machiavelli. Said another way, there's an element of complexity at stake in any analysis of politics that often goes unaccounted for where folks are eager for neat and tidy theories of how things got to where they are and where they are going.
As much as I enjoyed that post and it’s consistently beautiful phraseology, a standard I try and fail to meet in my own posting, it’s your birthday man go out and have a beer!
I absolutely 100% agree incidentally. Stuff is messy, there are literally millions of actors all pulling in various directions, for various reasons.
There isn’t some neat diffusion of power from some cabal downwards, it’s a shitloads of people tangled in a web and trying to extricate themselves where they can, and x individual pulling in a certain direction may benefit individual y in completely unintended ways.
For example an entirely earnest ‘the left has gone too far in suppressing free speech’ can become a useful vector for genuinely far right politics, despite that absolutely not being the intent.
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On December 05 2021 02:27 farvacola wrote:
It's a mistake to presume that actors like Supreme Court justices make choices as though they're beholden to some command-based structure where they take orders from wealth and power. That's a fallacy that I would summarize as Leftism's tendency to overdetermine the uniformity of power's constituency, especially in the face of an apparent Rightwing victory. Power doesn't beget itself via the neat cooperation of powerful entities, rather it is an emergent, iterative quality of a particular set of circumstances that, as a practical matter, include a ton of behind the scenes squabbling and fighting among power's claimants. I recommend the show Succession because it does a fairly good job of showing that off, but the idea that the powerful are powerful in part because of how they fight and cheat each other goes back to the times of Machiavelli. Said another way, there's an element of complexity at stake in any analysis of politics that often goes unaccounted for where folks are eager for neat and tidy theories of how things got to where they are and where they are going.
What is "Leftism"?
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Some mix of “help those who need help first, ask questions later” and the recognition that people and their well-being are fundamentally shaped by material conditions of existence, but any of the commonly used definitions would work in a pinch too.
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On December 05 2021 08:28 farvacola wrote:
Some mix of “help those who need help first, ask questions later” and the recognition that people and their well-being are fundamentally shaped by material conditions of existence, but any of the commonly used definitions would work in a pinch too.
Part of the reason I ask is because I don't think there are commonly used definitions. "Leftism/ist" typically serves to obfuscate whatever grouping people are actually talking about in my experience.
I guess what I'm particularly curious about is whether you're attempting to disagree with Marxist rooted class analysis or commenting on what you see as "Leftism's" + Show Spoiler +(I think it's a silly term at this point and don't identify as/with Leftist personally)
In other words, are you refuting the conceptualization of mutual class interests among various factions of the top echelons of wealth and power or just pointing out that some people (sometimes sympathetically, sometimes in bad faith) are reductive in their use/communication of it?
It's easy for people to confuse one for the other and I think it's an important distinction.
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EPT
