1001
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
1001 points (95.8% liked)
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The point of the term 'harm reduction' is that it is acknowledging that participation in bourgeois democracy is buying time rather than fundamentally reforming the system, I can't believe how many fucking times and in how many fucking ways I have to explain this to a community that is purportedly leftist.
So what do you do with that time? Hillary was buying time, Biden was buying time, Biden/Harris was buying time...
Instead what happened in these times was things to get worse, the "buying time" party bragging about its exploits in mass deportations, wall building and bombing abroad and ferociously fighting anyone that wanted to bring improvements. Even now we see the exact same thing with Mamdani. The DNC has "learned" absolutely nothing, because everything is going according to plan. Mamdani is threatening the plan. Tump is not.
When people decided to prevent ICE gestapo abducting people in their communities in California, Democratic mayors had the police crack down on them.
Your strategy is all messed up and it didn't lead you anywhere. With another four years of far right DNC politics as "harm reduction" you would have only fostered liberal complacency and ignorance and on top of it created the economic conditions for the next iteration of Fascism to hit back even harder. There is no fighting with the US political establishment. There is only fighting against it, if you ever want to see the US become a reasonably okay country.
This guy gets it, if the opposition party cares more about maintaining their legal bribes than punishing those doing the bribing and accepting the bribes then they bear an equal responsibility to the destination that those in the car are driven to.
It sounds like the problem is you don't have enough allies in the fight against either, and your strategy is to bank on getting more allies in a fight against fascists than you would against democrats.
Good luck with that, sincerely; but I think it sounds like a bit of a gamble. Fascists are quite good at terrorising moderates into compliance and killing or imprisoning their opponents.
Well said. I tried to make this point elsewhere in the thread and got showered with downvoted, so it's nice to see there's still some sanity left in the world.
Fucking fantastic that Thalmann is making a comeback.
The amazing thing is that there is no Thalmann. Our Hindenburg is so disliked that nobody has to split the vote for him to lose.
I laugh but I cry. But yes.
My point was more about the attitude of "Let fascism come, it will lead to Better Things(tm)" though.
Thalmann was the only electoral chance at stopping Hitler. We know this, because the alternative got us Hitler.
If only Thalmann had some other choice than being a Stalinist bootlicker who dissolved the successful united front with the SDP, unfortunately, he HAD to make sure that the right-wing was empowered against the dreaded SOCIAL FASCISTS until it was too late to stop Hitler. Luckily, unlike his issues with the SPD, he was perfectly willing to cooperate with the literal Nazis when it suited him. Poor man, really just left with no choice but to enable the literal Nazis. No wonder so many red-painted pro-genocide ghouls in the modern day look up to him.
Not really sure why a Holodomor denier is still allowed on here.