this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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And he saw nothing wrong with that.
Are you kidding? They're proud of it. They honestly think it's a good thing. Along with the recent article about ICE stopping brown people and using a phone app to ID them from a photograph , we've rocketed right past the Papers-Please phase of fascism into a high tech dystopian end game.
And yet still, somewhere out there, there is a fake or brain dead leftist spouting on about how democrats support genocide.
"Chemo makes me sick, so Ill stick with Cancer"
I mean some of them legit do (cough Fetterman), and a lot just don't particularly care about stopping it, but that's beside the point, I know the kind of people you're actually talking about. There is still value in electing the lesser evil, and pushing to get better and more progressive Dems in office (that are usually better at pushing back against fascism anyways)
This is exactly my point. The democrats have huge AIPAC backing and support some awful things, but they are fucking saints compared to the only other options in this political system.
They are the only potential vehicles for long term change and stability exactly the way you described.
Progressive candidates have to be winning primaries despite swimming upstream, and democrats have to continue winning federally despite the bad taste (chemo) they put in your mouth.
Lesser evil politics gets you fascism.
The timeline for when you feel a fascist nation's boot comes down to what your skin color is and where you're from.
The irony of saying this when we literally have a fascist dictator trashing the Whitehouse because we checks notes didn't vote for the "lesser evil" last year.
In case you haven't noticed, the system in place now in the US became what it is today under both Republican and Democrat Administrations.
One has to be a tribalist useful idiot to deny that "their side" has done as much to create a Surveillance State as the "other" side - amongst those few things which have bipartisan support in the US are strengthening of police powers and erosion of privacy.
The comparison with most of Europe (with notable exceptions such as Britain and Russia) is very telling: it absolutely is possible to have low crime without reckless invasion of privacy, widespread civil society surveillance, draconian police powers and a pay-to-play Judicial System.
This bothsiderism is pretty thoughtless.
It is true that both contribute to a surveillance state but to equate both is to just ignore all policy differences, actions and more to pretend to be nuanced while painting everything as the same shade of grey, which is a downgrade to even black and white thinking.
This is Politics, it's not 1D or 2D, it's N-Dimensional (with a very, very large N): it's not just possible but pretty much a Mathematical certainty than in a country were there are only 2 parties they will match perfectly on some dimensions, even whilst not at all matching in others.
Trying to dismiss away that aspect of Reality (which is incoveninent for tribalists) with sloganeering like "bothsiderism" is just parroting propaganda meant for simpletons who see reality as having just one dimension where there is nothing more than 2 sides.
It's pretty evident by their actual policies that strengthenning of police powers and the surveillance state are things in which both sides of the power duopoly in the US agree in the most, and it the face of both of those parties being shit on that domain your "yeah, but " discourse is really just trying to distract away from the most nasty aspects of both of those taking big fat dumps on the face of every American, by talking about subtle details in the shape and consistency of each one's shit.
Now, if you favorite party did start to diverge in that, you would have reason to celebrate, but it ain't hapenning and discourse such as yours makes it even harder that it will ever happen - why would the tribe's leadership change their ways when there's a veritable army of tribalist peons going "yeah, but, bothsiderism" at any criticism of what they do, even those parts which are undeniably shit.
This is the point I made and that your comment ignored.
This is a strawman. No person is claiming they don't have any aligning opinions.
This is you continuing to argue against the strawman.
The rest is also that.
You own post:
Your post starts with a sloganeering, hyper-reductive take of what I wrote.
As I wrote in response, "This is Politics, it’s not 1D or 2D"!
In case you're unware of it, two forests can be the same kind of forest even when the trees in each are different: demanding for others to focus on the details of the trees in each (otherwise they're "painting everything as the same shade of grey") is just a way to try to avoid that people look at the forest as a whole.
That said, you're right. The details are different and I didn't address that in my original post were I only talked about the main policy direction on these domains.
The broad policy direction on this subject is the same and the outcomes have been very similar and over time progressed in the same direction during the time in power of both parties, but things worsened in different domains at different speeds with different parties in power.
This is not even what many Americans call "the ratchet effect", it's actually worse because in this case it's not one pushing in a certain direction and the other refusing to revert it, it's actually both pushing in the same direction, with just some difference in details here and there which didn't add up to much difference in outcomes.
So yeah, my point stands that in this domain both US parties are shit and my second point also stands that you're trying to move the conversation away from criticizing parties for doing this shit by claiming that subtle differences in each party's shit are more important that the overall shitty nature of their actions in this.
Additionally, the citizens who support this kind of government surveillance are fine with a few innocents getting charged.
Particularly if those innocents are the "right" color.
So long as they aren't the ones getting turned into the new fountain on the campus, they couldn't care less.