I thought about it and realized that you missed the point of what I’m saying.

I’m arguing that the only way you can view them (both biden and FDR) as someone who did more good than harm is if you abstract the harms and goods from the perspective of someone who is not being harmed while being a person who is benefited.

FDR sentenced a single ethnicity to prison for the crime of being japanese. This destroyed generational wealth, and ruined the upward mobility of a generation. It’s easier to say “he did more good than harm” if you are both the one being harmed.

Biden is not just allowing genocide, but funding it, and attacking those who prevent it from continuing. If you are isolated from the suffering he is causing, it’s super easy to say he is doing more good than harm.

Sure, there are parallels that can be drawn, but that’s not what I’m arguing against. To say I’m proving this point would be true, but completely dishonest since it blatantly ignores the argument I made against that point you madr in the edit.

I have no idea what you mean by that

It’s been a rough week at work, and being in an environment where we are all on call and numerous people are subbing for others who are having life get in the way, a lot of people are working late and taking weekend shifts that they would have otherwise had off.

One of my college friends works with me, and I know his responses to these questions pretty well, and boy howdy have I seen him go through all of these responses in order as things got worse and worse while the director pops in and out of call to check on us and get updates on the situation.

Considering we would have had the weekend off and both of us stayed very late, things are going pretty OK, all things considered. Can’t complain too much if I’m still truckin’

That comes from an incredible point of privilege.

If you were one of the people who were thrown in an internment camp, you probably wouldn’t remember all the good. You would only remember years of your life, wasted, having been thrown in prison camps due to the circumstances of your birth. Fuck, if you were the child or grandchild of a survivor of it, you would remember the stories of your grandparents thrown in a camp, discarded from society by a xenophobic government who clearly sees them as a second class citizen. You might remember hearing about them selling their homes for a fraction of their worth in order to get anything from them at all. When they were finally free, they were homeless too.

If you were a Palestinian American, you probably are stressed out of your mind, waiting on the uncommon phone call from your family, hoping for a confirmation that they are alive, and hoping you don’t hear that your cousin was gunned down by a gun drone when looking for food, or your aunts, uncles, and their children were blown up at a refugee camp, or executed in a hospital.

You might not have heard anything for six months, and you feel like absolute shit, having gone to protests, and even direct actions to try and put a stop to it only to be ignored, called antisemites, or otherwise degraded by a government and press lying through their teeth to justify a “war” wholeheartedly supported by the president. You might be looking at your paystub, seeing almost a hundred bucks, maybe more, being taken by the government to fund the extermination of your family.

To say “FDR did some bad things, just like Biden. But we still remember all the good that came from him, of which there was arguably more” is not a pragmatic calculation. It is valuing the good done to you, as a person who wasn’t systemically attacked by the government during that time, over the suffering of a marginalized group who felt the force of a white supremacist government coming down on them. Being a social democrat doesn’t excuse anything bad FDR did, and it certainly doesn’t make up for any of the bad things either.

You are mostly there. One of the most important notes is that the project is settler colonial, and it is also helpful to point out that zionism is older than Israel, and it has been around for over 100 years.

+1 on that Shaun vid, it’s great

I'm an anarchist, and seeing someone say "to be liberal means you're against tyrants" is pretty humorous. It's a self-aggrandizing tale that doesn't reflect reality.

Liberals do not oppose tyranny. Liberals opposition to tyrants is done by keeping the offices clean, and the seats of power warm, be it in the oval office, judge's bench, or chairs in the chambers. Liberals vote for the lesser tyrant as an anti-tyranny measure. They oppose tyranny by increasing funding for the police, and giving bombs to fascists the world over while continuing to fund the biggest military budget in the world while giving the district of defense a thumbs-up to defend American interests by invading countries and slaughtering millions.

The so called United States is a liberal democracy. It always has been. And yet this structure is the cause of some of the most violent tyranny the entire world over. Even if you consider the fact that there have been some terrible presidents who might have been the cause for some of the most tyrannical acts of the state, the very act of saying "all men are created free and equal" is tyrannic when said by a slave owner trying to create a government that considers life to be property. And that was said before there were even presidents.

Under a liberal democracy, even with a liberal leader of it, being minoritized is a sentence to feel the tyranny of the state. It doesn't matter if you are a holding a minority political stance and using the liberal-approved mechanisms to oppose the state. It doesn't matter if you are a minority based on religion, sexuality, gender identity, race, or ethnicity trying to peacefully oppose the extermination of their group, or the systematic oppression of it. You will feel the force of a police officer's boot on your back and knee on your neck, tools of the liberal democracy being used to "keep the peace" or maintain "law and order".

Liberals will uphold the fundamental tyrannies of capitalism. Liberals will uphold the fundamental tyrannies of property ownership.

To be a liberal doesn't mean you are against tyrants. It means you are the lesser one.

I disagree.

The idea that a government will serve a people forms the basis of it’s legitimacy, but as long as a government rules over people, it does not need to serve them. It doesn’t matter whether or not the power is derived from the divine right of kings in a monarchy, or the tyrrany of the majority in a democracy (or alternatively, the tyrrany of the largest minority), the relationship of the governed and the government is always a relationship of subjugation. If enough votes are cast, people will be subjugated. Novel ways will be found to abjectify a group, imprison them, and subjugate them without breaking laws.

Saying the government serves the people doesn’t change the oppressive nature of the structure, and to say that the democratic coat of paint prevents it from being used to oppress is just naive.

The reason I consider both to be soulless is because the organization itself, be it a branch of government or a bureaucratic office, has their support based on political capital. If it becomes inconvenient to support the queers, their support is gone. This is the same with businesses, with monetary capital being the deciding factor of support.

You are right that the means of interaction is different betweeen the two, but that goes down to the currency used to interact with them.

I can’t say I’ve experienced pride a decade ago, since I’ve been closeted for years and only recently had the epiphany that I can just show up as an undercover ally now that it’s more socially acceptable to have solidarity with the queers.

I can see where you are coming from. Before I realized I was queer, I was an ally and I thought about it a similar way, happy to see people support a group one of my friends belonged to that has suffered historically.

I think our difference of opinion is summed up by your last paragraph:

no, those rainbow ads don’t mean anything more than the green and red ones in December, or the red hearts in February. But the fact that corporations are openly showing support without fear of death threats, or “more importantly” losing money, means something to me.

I genuinely don’t care about symbolic actions. I worry that corporations will heel turn the moment it is no longer safe or profitable to pander to the queers. Having rainbows in june does feel nice, but I’ve come to notice that it merely distracts me from the pain of the closet.

I think it’s more important that pride comes from a stronger base than the whim of a corporation chasing profit. As long as we are profitable, we get support. The moment things change, we lose it all.

I also have a problem with the corporatization of pride. When I went to my local pride parade, I wouldn’t be allowed to march, since I wasn’t a member of an organization/corporation, since pride was no longer for the people, it was for the corporation.

Queer protestors interrupted the parade to try and stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and they were beaten by the cops. Pride used to be a protest, but now protest was no longer possible in pride.

When unaffiliated queers tried to march through the street, cops blocked them and were preparing to arrest people before that crowd took a different route. Had that group of people been an employee of the local military contractor, they would have been able to stroll down the road with them unopposed.

My expression of pride was reduced to standing on the sidelines and watching corporations parade down the street with rainbow banners, interrupted by real people in organizations. There was a sterility of the corporate floats compared to a random organization marching down the road.

For example, there was a group of furries marching down the streets in their fursuits and the pride flags that represent them. There were multiple groups of drag queens strutting down the street with a car following them blasting music. These displays had a completely different feel than seeing some airline company march down the street with their little carts throwing pride themed merch at us.

To me, the big thing I want is solidarity, and corporations are incapable of giving that. And solidarity is what is going to matter if things come crashing down around us.

The soulless structure of the government is not much different than the soulless structure of a corporation.

Also, there is no indication that this isn’t a private consulting firm, for example.

No matter how much I hate corporate pride, I cannot find a fiber of my being that hates this

With police, an apparatus of the state.

You have to work harder to come to that conclusion than just going “hey isn’t the police employed by the government?”

Only authoritarian governments crush student protests