1501
To those in countries where democracy might last another election - harm reduction is not optional
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
1501 points (95.8% liked)
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Jesus fucking Christ. Do you know nothing of the history of this fucking country?
Oh, what am I saying? History is terribly inconvenient.
Therefore, power should be handed over to the fascists as quick as possible. Great.
So your opposition to harm reduction is... what? The belief that getting fascism sooner is Good, Actually?
All three of those were championed primarily by progressives.
Golly gee, I wonder why people might be hostile towards beating the "BIDEN BAD" drum during the period of 2024 when he was the only non-fascist candidate with a serious chance of winning the 2024 election.
It must be because we're secretly shitlibs. It's that deeply engrained desire to not lose an election to a fascist that gives us away - don't we know that both sides are basically fascists anyway?
In any case, the 'Big, Beautiful Bill' has passed, so I get to have my healthcare stripped away and vomit blood on the floor until I bleed out, so thanks for your unrelenting support for anti-anti-fascism for being insufficiently pure! If you want, I'll send you a selfie once the black-flecked puke starts coming up, so you have a nice little souvenir to celebrate with.
Maybe you can find another country to asspat accelerationists in until the fascists win, and get a few more selfies of that sort. Then you'll REALLY be owning the libs!
... the sort of cannibalism of... trying to push the necessity of a united front against a literal and outright fascist who was projected to win nearly half the vote?
If that's cannibalism, I shudder to think what you consider attacking the anti-fascist coalition candidate as.
"You see, if we operate under the axiom that our fate is inevitable, our fate is inevitable."
Wow, I'm just blown away by the complexity of that analysis. I guess we're all going to die, though, so we might as well hand over all power to the fascists as soon as we can.
The fuck are you 'saving' that money for, anyway, if the end result is that you're going to die? Pure thrift? Want to be buried with it?
If you were alive in 1950, you'd be saying the American Auschwitz was going to open by 1960 or 1962 anyway, so harm reduction was pointless. We were on the inevitable path to fascism within a decade, and there was nothing that could be done about it so long as the SHITLIBS were still in power.
"It's not fast enough, so stop, give up, and die"
Again, that is literally not what I'm saying, and at this point you seem to be arguing with a strawman. I'm not anti-harm reduction; I simply believe that the efficacy of harm reduction is predicated on effective action that simply does not exist at present. What I'm calling for is for the left to shift gears to direct action to coerce the system into getting its shit in order. Also vote for the less shitty candidate, but that shouldn't be where you put all or even most of your energy, because losing that particular bet is a mathematical certainty.
See above.
Yes, there's a reason I called it cannibalism.
See? This is exactly what I'm talking about. Biden 2024 wasn't an outlier in an otherwise sane political climate; that shit was the new post-2016 normal. Any credible strategy needed to provide a path to victory through that new normal within a decade (more realistically five years, but eh) without letting fascists win in the meantime. So-called harm reduction focuses so much on the latter that it does nothing substantial to address the former.
Looking forward to it ;).
American Hitler wasn't winning elections in 1950 so... no?
Okay it's starting to feel like you're scanning my responses for keywords rather than actually reading what I'm saying.
Except your entire argument here is positing that harm reduction is worthless because it doesn't serve the long-term goals you see as necessary fast enough.
And reminding everyone that harm reduction under current circumstances is pointless, don't forget.
... losing elections is a mathematical certainty?
Because... progressives made campaigns, and largely, simultaneously, supported the Dem candidate...?
Okay? What the ever-loving fuck does that have to do with ensuring Biden in 2024 didn't lose, because his opponent was a literal fascist?
"He wasn't giving us a long-term strategy for victory, so fuck your anti-fascist coalition!"
This is the doomer equivalent of accelerationism.
"I wonder why these people are so worried about not dying of thirst today??? Don't they know that they haven't fixed the problems in water supply over the next decade???"
If only we worried less about dying of thirst today. Such short-term thinking!
Unsurprising. The lives of marginalized groups don't matter if they're insufficiently ideologically pure. I guess I was too interested in not dying because of a fuckwad fascist administration.
Oh, sorry, so you prefer 1896 or 1912 or 1968 or 1980 for your narrative of "America was going to fall forever to fascism in ten years, and there's nothing these silly 'harm reducers' can do about it"?
Your entire fucking point is predicated on the idea that fascism is inevitable because change wasn't happening fast enough, so harm reduction was functional worthless to pursue. I am absolutely reading what you're saying; the problem is you aren't following the logical conclusions of what you yourself are saying.
This isn't going anywhere, so I'll clarify my position one final time before I disengage.
Harm reduction alone was functionally worthless to pursue, yes. Harm reduction is fine, desirable even, but not at the expense of antagonistic action. Prioritizing harm reduction over the antagonistic action that's supposed to be facilitated by that harm reduction is putting the cart before the horse and self-defeating. By antagonistic action I'm mostly thinking of protests, civil disobedience, strikes and whatever Uncommitted was here, but for an easy example I'll use the early to mid-2024 calls for Biden to step down. Doubling down on hard reduction entailed shutting down calls for Biden to step down to not jeopardize the anti-fascist united front, but I believe that to have been a mistake. The play was to jump on and amplify these calls so that Biden would step down sooner and open the way for a real primary, because it's these sort of actions that give harm reduction meaning, otherwise it becomes simply kicking the can down the road. Harm reduction is necessary but not sufficient for fighting fascism, so it cannot happen at the expense of other necessary actions, such as coercing the Democrats into providing a viable unity platform. That's why I called it farcical (which, yeah, I still stand by that characterization); it's like filling a bowl with eggs and trying to make cake.