wiki-user: unruffled

  • When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick.”
  • If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

- Mikhail Bakunin

  • 152 Posts
  • 164 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Donald Trump’s administration initiated a sustained, years-long effort to erase protections for LGBTQ people. This included an effort to “define ‘transgender’ out of existence,” erode protections for transgender students and workers, and weaken access to gender-affirming health care that most transgender people already struggled to access.

    While President Joe Biden’s administration reversed much of the Trump-era abuses, just last month on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to dismantle a new Biden administration policy that will offer protections for transgender students under Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. […]

    Trump on LGBTQ Rights

    The Facts: Trump has promised that, if reelected, his administration will rescind federal policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and will assert that federal civil rights laws don’t cover anti-LGBTQ discrimination. In addition to rolling back existing protections, a second Trump administration will proactively mandate discrimination by the federal government wherever it can. Lastly, and perhaps most ominously, if Trump returns to the White House, we expect his administration to use federal law – including laws meant to safeguard civil rights – as a cudgel to override critical state-level protections for transgender students and to force state and local governments, as well as private organizations, to allow or even perpetuate discrimination

    Why It Matters: A second Trump administration would strip LGBTQ people of protections against discrimination in many contexts, including employment, housing, education, health care, and a range of federal government programs. The Trump administration’s proposed policies would ban transgender people from serving openly in the armed forces and block gender-affirming medical care for transgender people enrolled in federal healthcare programs, such as Medicare. The effects of these cruel – and unconstitutional – discrimination efforts would be devastating, as thousands of transgender people would immediately lose access to needed medical care and the right to live freely without fear. In essence, a potential second Trump administration would seek to erase transgender people from public life entirely by using federal laws – including obscenity laws – to criminalize gender nonconformity.

    - Source: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trump-on-lgbtq-rights-rolling-back-protections-and-criminalizing-gender-nonconformity

    I think that accurately sums up the Trump administration’s stance on LGBTQ issues. But if that was a rhetorical question, then go ahead and answer it yourself.







  • Isn’t it (at least notionally) communists who are currently busy conscripting immigrants and waging an illegal invasion and attempted genocide of Ukraine, while the US helps Israel to carry out genocide in Gaza? But I guess imperialism is ok when it’s a communist state doing it?

    I have zero problem with criticizing the US where I think it’s deserved. I’m not American, and I don’t live there. It’s the double standards I don’t like and MLs hiding behind “critical support” to ONLY criticize the US, or more broadly, the West. Complaining about the US supporting right wing states like Israel, while MLs give Russia a free pass for cozying up to Iran and North Korea in order to wage an imperialist war to re-vassalize Ukraine just seem like political partisanship to me. They all suck. None of them deserve a free pass, and we shouldn’t buy Putin’s pretexts for starting and continuing that war any more than we should accept Israel’s pretexts for continuing their genocide. If all someone does is criticize the West while giving a free pass to everyone who hates the West, then they are simply propagandists as far as I’m concerned (and vice versa). Not accusing you of that specifically, but I see it all the time on some instances.

    As an anarchist living in a liberal democracy, my observation is that replacing a Capitalist authoritarian State with a Communist authoritarian State in the vein of Russia or China is simply not something that I (or really any significant demographic living in the West) wants. You’re never going to get a communist revolution in the US - it’s nothing but a fantasy. All the failed Communist experiments around the world have destroyed its appeal as a viable alternative. Of course we could argue about why they failed, but that’s really beside the point here.

    Having said that, I have no doubt that Socialism is a better and more equitable economic model than Capitalism. And I think you are right, we probably do want the same end state, we are just arguing over the means to that end, and perhaps over some of the implementation details. But the question of how to get from the current state to some future anarcho-socialist state is unresolved, as you are no doubt well aware. I don’t think anyone has written a convincing account of that might credibly happen in an advanced economy like the US, especially when the population is so brainwashed the working class routinely votes against their own interests.

    My personal view is that the US would be well served by the creation of a third major political party that is unapologetically Socialist. I know Bernie was/is imperfect, but if he had started his own party instead of aligning with the Democrats, US politics might look very different right now. He was actually grass-roots popular, and some form of Democratic Socialism is likely the only type of Socialism that is likely to get over the line in the US as a first step back to the left. IMO it’s going to be impossible to move the Democrats to the left, so we need to start over, before they assimilate and neutralize all the truly progressive candidates.