(this is a sarcastic post meant to highlight the absurdity of some of the “greater good” rhetoric we’ve been hearing, especially around leaving vulnerable populations like disabled people behind in case of revolution, basically accelerationism)
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
751 points (92.4% liked)
Microblog Memes
7492 readers
3676 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Difficult to raise this amongst friends but one 2022 story came to mind
https://www.vox.com/policy/385549/trans-sports-transgender-biden-harris-democrats-titleix
PS: obviously my conflict is about “fight for 1% of athletes vs. lose election to Hitlerguy and harm like 50% of the population”, to oversimplify greatly
I bet we could get even more of these conservatives on our side if we promised to repeal gay marriage. Let's try that, too
Ooh, and we could get even more people if we promised to put the Jews in camps
If you aren't going to fight for that "1% of athletes" even though you think they're right just because they're too politically inconvenient then I have zero faith you'll fight for me when I'm politically inconvenient and actually need you to
Liberals will say shit like this and then be baffled why leftists don't want to fall in line behind the party of moderate fascists.
You throw trans people under the bus and you also lose, or at least depress turnout, of everyone who supports trans rights. You also make it clear to every minority that if they're in the crosshairs next, they'll be sacrificed next for the same reasons of political convenience. Jews represented <1% of the population of Weimar Germany, and you may be familiar with a poem about what happened after they came for them.
Furthermore, by ceding ground to the Republicans on this you make them look correct and you discredit your own side for having previously denounced their position as bigoted, which makes people more likely to support Republicans. We saw this happen with the border, when the Democrats turned from "Building the wall is racist" to "We're the ones who are actually going to build the wall," they didn't win over moderate republicans, instead they lost on virtually every demographic. The people who are pro-immigration hated it and the people who are anti-immigration saw their views as being validated and if they had any lingering reservations about voting Republican, those reservations vanished.
Framing politics as a Trolley Problem is extremely stupid, and fundamentally not how the world works, it's liberal brainrot and one of the reasons Democrats are worthless. They literally did this "strategic" sacrifice with Palestinians and immigrants (and it's not like they fully supported trans rights either) and they still ate shit with the worst electoral map since the Republicans took California. When throwing trans people to the wolves doesn't work, which minority will you sacrifice next?
Republicans who got on the "Freak out about transgender policy" lost their elections in droves in 2022. Several big swing Senate seats flipped because guys like Blake Masters and Herschel Walker couldn't stop screaming slurs at campaign rallies. We've seen Republicans scrub out over and over again by downing too much of their own kool-aid.
Democrats didn't lose 2024 because they were too nice to Transgender people. They lost because they were too nice to Liz Cheney. Harris made a big show of aligning with neoconservatives on everything from immigration and trade to military policies against Russia and China to the stubborn endorsement of the Palestine genocide. All of this shit polled worse than support for Transgender civil rights. Harris had no problem throwing the country in front of Hitlerguy to endorse the tear-gassing of Columbia University and the Kids In Cages on the Texas/Mexico border.
Even then... even if you can argue with a stack full of polling papers that Harris knew with perfect certainty and well in advance of the November vote that an impassioned speech in defense of transgender athletes would doom her campaign and subject the US to Hitlerguy, so what? She didn't do this and she still fucking lost.
So she and the rest of her squishy latte liberal cohort threw away a big chunk of LGBTQ support for what? What did Dems gain by embracing reactionary policy?
This right here can't be said enough. The problem isn't policies that are too leftist. It's the "liberals" that a working so hard to cozy up to conservatives. If we wanted moderate Republicans we'd vote for 'em. We want fucking leftists goddammit!!!
On one hand I don't fucking like Liz Cheney... on the other hand.... I think you should welcome (almost) anyone against an enemy like Trump. I thought that at the time, and now with the additional information we've gained since then (and I personally learned) only reaffirm that to me. We don't have to glorify Liz Cheney later.
But not voting for Kamala because the coalition allowed Liz Cheney in is probably just as dumb as not voting for Kamala because somehow... Trump isn't WORSE on Palestine?
There is not a "single issue" that won for them beyond voter manipulation. They did the same thing as 2016 and did targeted ads and segmenting people on social media. Mass voter suppression in the south (Russian bomb threats in Georgia... the disenfranchisement across multiple states...etc) FB & Twitter owned by them. TikTok in question but absolutely started showing even more right wing content after the election. I'm sure one issue (or two) might be more influential, but that's only because of the coordinated reach of their voter manipulation.
We have ALL been targeted with propaganda and segmented from each other. They continue to do it now. They lie and Fox News, which something like 60% of the country, carries their lies for them. Bots barrage social media every where. Tech-bro toelickers and tankies promote right wing, anti-globalist propaganda everywhere. (Anti-globalism is primarily right wing, Kremlin propaganda to disconnect The Americas (primarily US ofc) from Europe).
Be wary of bots that feel like they're your ally, too.
"But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.”
Excerpt From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Shirer, William
I would much rather have the people who hate the Cheney's guts in my coalition than have the Cheney's. How many people do they even represent? Who doesn't hate them, and with good reason?
First off they didn't just "allow" Liz Cheney, they actively campaigned with her. But secondly and more importantly, it's not about whether it was right or wrong for that to influence people's decisions, it's about the fact that it likely did. Call it "dumb" or "irrational" all you want, if voters were all rational and intelligent then maybe we wouldn't have to think or care about messaging or image at all, but that's not the world we live in.
The influence of "bots" is highly overstated and is basically just a way of dismissing legitimate criticism and preventing any kind of self-reflection or learning from mistakes.
Why are you asking what the dems gained? You’re the one now worse off?
What did you gain by not voting for her?
The problem with this is that it assumes Democrats have no agency. Democratic politicians have treated trans issues like those crusty old male Dems who don't like saying the word abortion.
Dems have never provided loud and full-throated support to trans issues. Go watch the recent John Oliver video on trans sports. There are very very good arguments on why excluding trans people from sports is incredibly anti-scientific and just thinly disguised bigotry. But Democratic politicians have never bothered developing the talking points to defend trans people, like they have for other core issues.
Look at how Kamala responded when asked about trans issues. She didn't provide full-throated support to trans people. Her reply was simply, "I'll follow the law."
Democrats have completely failed to defend trans people. They've quietly passed a few state level anti-discrimination laws, but in terms of rhetoric, they've completely ceded the space to conservatives. The only mainstream voices talking about trans issues have been the anti-trans bigots. The Democrats have instead just called the whole issue a distraction and hoped it would all just blow away.
They're right that it is a distraction, an artificial one concocted by Republicans. But that doesn't mean they can just ignore it.
Propaganda works. And if you don't do the hard rhetorical work to fight it, it eventually does change public opinion.
Well, that's more than she was willing to do for Gaza.
and now gaza is safe, and everyone clapped.
oh wait, no, trump wants to annex it.
along with greenland and canada and the panama canal.
something tells me these populations would have preferred the 'I'll follow the law' candidate happily vs the 'i'll annex your country unilaterally' shitbag.
but you don't fucking care about any of them lol. you got your principled win, good for you, and now the trans folks will be persecuted actively, gaza will be torn apart and sold to the highest bidders, and american kids are going to die invading our former allies.
great fucking work, your principles are fantastic.
Sorry, now that's going to happen? What the hell did you think was happening before?
So, how large does a minority have to be before they are no longer disposable?
Lincoln didn't run on ending slavery, but plenty of abolitionists supported him, including Frederick Douglas
Douglass was also very involved in national politics, and as the presidential election of 1860 approached, he advocated for candidates with strong antislavery platforms. American voters received a ballot crowded with four candidates: Abraham Lincoln (Republican), John C. Breckenridge (Southern Democrat), Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat), and John Bell (Constitutional Union). Douglas’s belief in “popular sovereignty,” Breckenridge’s pro-slavery platform, and Bell’s aversion to the issue entirely left Frederick Douglass to endorse Lincoln and the Republicans, whom he believed were more antislavery than the divided Democrats.
It’s possible to be willing to jump in front of a bullet to save a trans brother and loudly tell everyone to shut the fuck up about sports until we codify the right protections into the constitution etc.
Back channels baby! Back channel fights on controversial topics. Fox News can’t demonize what they’re ignorant of.
But this is assuming this topic is popular on the left and it’s reportedly divisive (again, amongst those who are not hateful scumbags)
If you think that you can change the Constitution through back channels, then I need to know what you're smoking.
Backchannel until [super]majority agreement achieved before going public!
Back channels! Where you can say you're doing something but aren't actually doing shit!
Back channels are the only place where democrats oppose genocide, support unions, try to keep abortion legal, and are diligently working to make cannabis legal.
reminds me of 2003, when the bush regime convinced everyone that their marriage would somehow be worthless if they let the gays get married.
and it worked, the stupid fucks bought it. iraq paid badly for it tho, whoo hoo...