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WTF Joe (lemmy.world)
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[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 192 points 5 months ago

https://lemmy.world/post/16146433

Here's actual context for anyone who wants it.

The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.

But sure, both sides the same, if this time we let fascism win it will totally make us into a left-wing paradise, etc etc etc.

[-] Allonzee@lemmy.world 90 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm voting Biden out of harm reduction because I don't have the stones to walk away and be complicit in additional short term suffering/scapegoating/cruelty, but Biden just like Trump ultimately serves our owner class, and we need to collapse to have any hope of anything but living in this dystopic oligarchy.

The neoliberals and the fascists alike work to maintain the power of our owner class. We're only permitted a vote on how to address the social issue symptoms of our rigged economic system. I'd rather we not address those symptoms with scapegoating and fear, so Biden it is.

Don't mistake that vote for even beginning to solve anything though. This country is died under Reagan. Something new will eventually have to take its place for any gains to be made at this point, this corpse is too far captured, it has been reformed to maintain class occupation and maximum exploitation under both (D) and (R) representatives, both legally bribed and fully owned when it comes to legislating and protecting the long con that is our market capitalist economic system.

When capitalist induced, reckless growth/metastasis caused climate change is thinning our numbers due to hunger/thirst/deadly weather, maybe then, far too late, we will finally unite against our common enemy in their towers, golf clubs, and guard gated communities.

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 41 points 5 months ago

Don’t mistake that vote for even beginning to solve anything though. This country is died under Reagan. Something new will eventually have to take its place for any gains to be made at this point, this corpse is too far captured, it has been reformed to maintain class occupation and maximum exploitation under both (D) and ® representatives, both legally bribed and owned.

I agree that voting is the minimum and will not solve any issues on its own, but we've been in worse spots regarding corruption, and still came out capable of reform. The fight isn't over, and there's more than a corpse left to fight over. The country hasn't died under Reagan unless we're willing to let it die.

Campaign finance reform has been a rallying cry of the progressive wing of the Dem Party as soon as Citizens United happened. We, as a society, must relearn the value of strikes and disruptive protests to succeed, but I believe do have a future still.

[-] Allonzee@lemmy.world 29 points 5 months ago

Aww yes, I remember having hope.

[-] confusedbytheBasics@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago

Vote Biden so elections keep happening and make change at your local level. Voting in the interest of the people in local races where your vote really makes a difference. That's the only peaceful way to improve I know of.

Giving up hope is what the owner class wants.

[-] Allonzee@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I think the owner class has come to use false hope as yet another tool to keep us docile. Change can come... just keep supporting one of these 2 parties we pay very well, and be so patient you'll die hoping!

Lots of little ways to manipulate hope. We love to crow about our right to protest, but the only "protest" allowed is non-disruptive with a permit out of eyeline of those your protesting in a designated protest zone so as not to... Gasp... disrupt commerce. That kind of protest is masturbation. Any real protest and we'd be killed just like all those places that don't allow faux protest or real protest.

Why fight those you lord over, when you can manipulate them into fighting one another, and even profit off their infighting?

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

Lots of little ways to manipulate hope. We love to crow about our right to protest, but the only “protest” allowed is non-disruptive with a permit out of eyeline of those your protesting in a designated protest zone so as not to… Gasp… disrupt commerce. That kind of protest is masturbation.

That kind of protest is essential. Just because it's not the only form of protest that should be pursued doesn't mean it's worthless, or not a major part of the solution. Disruptive protests are an escalation that should be used carefully.

In any behavior, you should ask yourself how you would like the government to act if it was your opposition doing the same. It's my view that it is necessary for the government to take steps to disband disruptive protests, but that it is also morally correct to endure in making disruptive protests in the case (and insofar) you find it strengthens a just movement, despite government repression.

Any real protest and we’d be killed just like all those places that don’t allow faux protest or real protest.

We are a very long way away from 'all those places'. Don't confuse being bad with being equally bad.

[-] Banana@sh.itjust.works 17 points 5 months ago

I remember having hope, then being pessimistic, then learning to have hope again because there is no action without hope, and no progress without action.

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

Gotta hold onto something. Some of it is just a desire to believe in a better future, but some of it is rooted in a fascination with history. Everyone always thinks they're living in the last days - if not in religious terms, in political ones. Every polity is on the cusp of dissolution in every era - but actual dissolution is comparatively rare.

We survived the early crises of 1790s, the oligarchic 1800s and 1810s, the struggle for democracy* (BIG asterisk) and against regionalism in the 1820s and 1830s, the anti-immigrant fevers of the 1840s and 1850s, the literal civil war and a Southern sympathizer in the role as president during the 1860s, the corruption and heightened partisan activity of the 1870s, the robber barons of the 1880s and 1890s, the labor upheavals of the 1900s, the free market fetishism of the 1920s, the depression and rise of fascism in the 1930s, WW2 in the 40s, the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s, the Christofascist threat starting in the 80s, the militia movements of the 90s, the creeping security state of the 2000s and 2010s...

All great upheavals with the potential to tear the country apart, for better or worse (most of them with considerable overlap). All of them we've survived. And many countries alive today have similar stories.

It's up to us, the Americans of our age, to ensure that the 2020s are remembered as a time of struggle against entrenched elites and the pushback inherent to that.

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[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago

Luckily the ACLU is already taking up the fight...

Buts it's disgusting watching so many people defend it because he has a D by his name, thats what republicans did, and it didn't take long to get to trump.

Throwing all your standards away is never a good thing.

[-] Icalasari@fedia.io 22 points 5 months ago

Also remember that the GoP, if they get in, will dismantle the system entirely and probably allow public executions of LGBTQ

It's not that people like Joe

It's that they want a democracy to remain

Hell, a lot are probably hoping Joe drops dead of old age shortly into a second term

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

Hell, a lot are probably hoping Joe drops dead of old age shortly into a second term

I'm not.

Harris is worse.

2028 primary can't come soon enough.

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[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

But the thing is...

Everyone voting for Biden, would vote for anyone with a D by their name. Even if they had zero idea what that name was.

So why not run a popular candidate, who won't do all this horrible shit, and win even easier?

Like, everyone just accepts that Biden is the only option besides trump.

And he's not even a good option. He barely won last time when he didn't have all the baggage.

[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Me, who remembers Nader and the 2000 stolen election that started kicked off this entire slide towards a fascist state, reading comments and posts like this.

Don't gift the GOP the election just because Biden sucks ass. He has sucked ass since always, but he's better than the literal wnd of American democracy.

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago

So why not run a popular candidate,

Okay, which popular candidate is running?

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[-] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

hE bARleY WoN LAsT tImE.

Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.

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[-] return2ozma@lemmy.world 12 points 5 months ago

Blue MAGA is gonna Blue MAGA.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 10 points 5 months ago

Hey, it's your catch phrase! Bad news though, I made a little histogram, and it's not catching on. There was a huge spike back around the 20th of May when you and a few other people made a concerted effort to start using it, but it dwindled back down to like a few times a week again since then.

I think you should start inserting it into the discourse some more. It's sure to catch on. Just keep repeating it! Don't get discouraged if people make fun of you for it.

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[-] masquenox@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

“The white conservatives aren't friends of the Negro either, but they at least don't try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the "smiling" fox.” - Malcom X

Remember, folks... friends don't let friends remain liberals.

[-] return2ozma@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

Here you go... The Most Dangerous Thing in the Western Hemisphere

https://youtu.be/33p-8QHZpzY

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[-] Raiderkev@lemmy.world 24 points 5 months ago

DAE both sides bad?

[-] krashmo@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago

What is the progressive policy on immigration? I've heard all the reasons why Republican plans are racist and xenophobic and all that but not much substance on what should be in place instead. It seems to me to be the left's version of a GOP Healthcare plan. "We have one and it's totally great but it won't be ready until next week."

Does someone want to enlighten me?

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 53 points 5 months ago

The progressive policy on immigration has been repeated for about a decade and a half now - path to citizenship for those who've grown up in the US, looser immigration restrictions, higher quotas, more judges to address backlog, etc. There have been a few attempts at implementation but all of them were ultimately shut down by Republican intransigence.

[-] donuts@kbin.social 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Today's executive order doesn't conflict with any of those things.

In fact, all it does it put a temporary limit on extralegal border-crossing asylum claims to 2,500 people per day. So it does not, in fact, "shut down" asylum claims, nor does it increase deportations of people who have been living here.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry

Is the United States supposed to take in an unlimited number of unauthorized border-crossers every day?

Is that the way it's going to go down? The right falsely accuses the left of being for "open borders", and the left's response is to actually just take the bait and make that their stance?

Because if that's the new progressive litmus test (it's hard to keep up since there seems to be a new one every day) then we have well and truly jumped the shark. Even progressive hero FDR turned away tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees:

In 1933, and again in 1937, the Roosevelt administration modified the “likely to become a public charge” restriction, but kept it in place. German Jews attempting to immigrate to the United States in the 1930s were still often rejected for economic reasons.

As a result of these legal and administrative obstacles to immigration, less than 20% of the German quota was filled during FDR’s first term. The Roosevelt administration focused on domestic problems, chiefly combatting the Great Depression. Though Americans certainly had information about the threat Nazism posed to German Jews, few could have imagined the persecution would escalate to mass murder. FDR did not take significant action to aid German Jews, either by ordering a diplomatic protest or by publicly supporting increased immigration.

Some people on this website who claim to be "on the left" are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don't give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

Some people on this website who claim to be “on the left” are now just inventing shit to be mad at Biden for, I guess either because they are really sockpuppet Trump supporters trying to incite division amongst Democrats, or maybe because they simply don’t give a fuck if fascism takes over the US.

The last one. Many are under the delusion that if fascism wins, it'll make the left suddenly REALLY popular.

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[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

So there are three urgent problems with immigration in this country, two of which root back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country which wasn't matched by a corresponding spike in the resources for the agencies that deal with them:

  1. The agency which runs the border patrol and immigration is made of oppressive and racist people
  2. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons (see point #1)
  3. We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #2), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous

Biden is unable to fix #1 without an act of God (basically firing all existing ICE and CBP agents and then finding 45,000 people who really want to work as immigration police but who aren't racist or oppressive). He's unable to fix #2 or #3, although those ones do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it (e.g. try to increase the number of deportations or increase ICE resources, both of which are actually things that would help reduce the suffering from its current state), everyone on the left yells at him, because US immigration is cruel and interacting with it involves interacting with a cruel system.

I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy: What exactly should Biden do to fix the situation? Without resorting to magical solutions like "make ICE not racist" or "just fix the backlog without congress" or just making wild assertions like "oh he could fix it if he wanted to, he just doesn't want to" or similar things that aren't how the federal government works?

I'm open to almost anything; I'm happy to talk about details or exact things or policies, as long as it's grounded in "X and Y are policies he could realistically do and here is how it would help." But if it's just yelling and asserting that he is cruel and he could fix it if he wanted and he's a bad man because US immigration is cruel (which, it certainly is, famously so) and that's all his fault, I'm not into that conversation.

[-] donuts@kbin.social 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I would ask ozma the same thing I asked about marijuana policy

Your mistake is thinking that return2ozma is a regular person looking for a nuanced policy debate within the parameters of reality, and not just (at best) some guy who spends every waking hour posting bullshit on lemmy or (at worst) a sock puppet knowingly posting bad-faith arguments as a form of political propaganda.

I don't know for sure, but I do know that someone who has posted 2550 threads in 11 months (~8 threads/day on average) lives online and should be generally disregarded by any normal, rational person. Ask yourself what kind of person has that much free time to post on reddit/lemmy/social media...

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[-] The2500@kbin.social 10 points 5 months ago

Well, ultimately I want a utopian Star Trek universe with no borders but that's kind of a pipe dream right now, so I'm just throwing my arms into the air in the interim.

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[-] return2ozma@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago

Context..

Biden pulls from Trump’s immigration playbook in election-year twist

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/04/politics/border-biden-trump-what-matters/index.html

[-] CaptainKickass@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago

That's bullshit, you Russian troll

[-] return2ozma@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

It's from CNN. Is CNN Russian now?

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 20 points 5 months ago

Okay, so this is an example of why I think you're some sort of fake leftist. You've said this exact thing to me earlier and I didn't really dwell on it all that much -- but it is very bizarre for a supposedly far-left person to hold up CNN as a trusted source. Almost everyone on the left in the US regards CNN as corporate garbage.

The time before, you actually were arguing with me when I was criticizing a CNN article I think, something like you don't know how much more liberal it can get than CNN and you don't see why I would question it, which I interpreted as one of those accidental big slip-ups where the mask comes off a little bit. Maybe I am wrong in that, of course. Surely there are people on the left who for whatever reason trust CNN. But I think the ones of them that are also rabidly anti-establishment-Democrat are probably a lot more rare than you realize. It struck me as much more a statement that would come from someone outside the left, who was accidentally using their own viewpoint on CNN (that it's "liberal") and not the fake leftist view they were supposed to be using.

But yes, CNN criticizing Biden on immigration means more or less nothing. I actually talked a little more at length -- I think with you -- about the ACLU's criticism of him, which although I would take a lot more seriously I also don't agree with, and I explained some of the reasons why. But, predictably, you ignored it and just went back to repeating over and over again that Biden is bad on immigration.

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[-] Hildegarde@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

everyone who disagrees with me is russian or chinese

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 10 points 5 months ago

Everyone why says any version of that line is blocked.

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[-] tsonfeir@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago

Ahh yes, the right-wing memes.

[-] PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

Whats right wing about this? Because Joe Biden made a stupid decision that is actually right wing?

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 13 points 5 months ago

For one thing, Biden isn't talking about deporting everyone, so the post is just a lie.

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[-] Ion@lemmy.myserv.one 10 points 5 months ago

*Ah yes, the right wing immigration policy

FTFY

[-] queue 16 points 5 months ago

Ah, liberal harm reduction. "Biden can't change this, its all up to congress. BTW Biden had to personally close the border without congress."

Jesus Christ, just keeps shooting the chance of not having Trump in the foot, and Trump's brain melts down on Fox News. Our options are a brain that's able to work but chooses not to, and a puddle of gray matter with orange spray paint.

Democracy!

[-] Ibaudia@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

Here's the thing, this uses the same legal framework that Trump tried to use when his border crossing ban was struck down in court. Most likely this will be challenged immediately and struck down. This feels like a desperate bid to please moderates and republicans IMO. Not like this will actually survive to be enforced. Still horribly irresponsible and pussy-footing though.

[-] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 months ago

Asylum seekers are the ones turning themselves in... and it is well known closing off asylum seekers and increasing deportations directly leads to more border crossings.

What is the gameplan here with this order? Surely commit extensive resources to the bottlenecked bureacracy to help with processing and screening asylum seekers? Right?

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[-] NoSuchAgency@reddthat.com 10 points 5 months ago

It's what you would call Hypocrisy

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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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