This is great and has pinpoint accuracy, especially about the way people treat it as their weary duty to instruct us that whatever elected official we have just mentioned is Bad Actually. Thanks, Ian, I’ll be sure to look into this Iraq War thing you’ve brought to my attention
I mean fuck:
Left-Wing Vote Suppression
One manifestation of this indiscriminate biliousness is the statement that gets aired every four years: that in presidential elections we are asked to choose the lesser of two evils. Now, this is not an analysis or an insight; it is a cliché
this essay is so on-the-nose it’s depressing
“Liberals often concentrate on domestic policy, where education, health care, and economic justice matter more and where Democrats are sometimes decent, even lifesaving, while radicals are often obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else.”
it is incredibly depressing that generation after generation stubbornly refuses to learn from the last. I wish I could go back in time and show this to my 18-year-old self before pulling the lever for Nader thinking it would send a message and push the party to the left
It's incredible how many people continue to deny that Gore would have won if not for Nader, given that the margin in Florida was ~500 votes.
Nader negated his entire career as an environmentalist by preventing an environmentalist from beating an oil tycoon.
You know who else is "obsessed with US foreign policy to the exclusion of all else"?
People who don't live in the USA, can't vote in your elections, but who are nevertheless affected by you.
There are several dozen of them, at least. And while they may be only 50% human, they do still count.
And I guarantee that outside of the US, most people prefer Biden to Trump. In fact, there seems to be puzzlement about how this election is even happening.
Not that this isn't bollocks in its own right anyway, but it also would be more convincing had the US not been busy supporting actual genocide right now.
"Forget about American imperialism and genocides conducted on the back of US arms sales, these are hardly REAL lefty concerns" is the most bonkers nationalist nonsense, tbh.
Everything is not perfect, therefore this piece criticizing Leftists for their self-defeating habit of being relentlessly, off-puttingly bitter & negative because the world is not perfect, is bollocks
hotDAMN, say this louder for the folks in the back! (And by 'folks in the back,' I mean the Kamala-is-a-cop eternal defeatists who will be beating this same drum if and when she's running for president again.)
Wish i had read it then. Sums up the essential problem of the “Left” since it emerged in 1791 in Paris: the apparently irresistible urge to disagree within its big tent with such constant vehemence it can never stay together long enough to build a house. The greatest conservative asset: the Left.
Authoritarian liberals can't stand it when their policies and arguments go bust and they're called on it.
It's hilarious, but not like failing at M4A, student loan abolition, legal cannabis, and codified Roe, then expecting rampant amnesia and lots of votes, in that order.
Fuck Biden and fuck you.
Damn, the Tom Dispatch, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. My entry point to the political blogosphere c. 2003. Probably came across it looking for news on the Howard Dean campaign
i feel you. and i more or less act accordi ng to this, but humanity is at a crossroads, “transform or die,” and everything needs to do one or the other. balanced, nuanced attitudes might not be up to the task…
