Greenleaf

Even my old liberal self would have hated that law, because flags are cool.

~~Dudes~~ Gals rock.

LOL

This is the comment that caused the coup in Bolivia.

Kind of obvious but probably the most heated back-and-forth will be when they’re arguing over who loves Israel more and who will do more to ensure Israel can continue their genocide.

I can acknowledge there is a marginal difference between Biden and Trump. However, by accepting whatever infinitesimally small difference there is and voting for Biden, that is effectively an endorsement of everything Biden has done over the last four years (not just Gaza, but also things like breaking the railroad strike). Do that and not only does the left lose whatever small leverage we have, but it also signals to Biden that yes, go ahead and brutally murder thousands of innocent little kids, the left will eventually fall in line no matter what. This means the next time there’s a genocide (say that Israel decides to completely annex the West Bank and ethnically cleans the Palestinians there) the Democrats will have zero fear of any consequences of being a critical partner to Israel in that genocide.

Yes I am a single-issue voter. My single issue is that I don’t vote for people who are actively committing a genocide.

These little assholes know they’re not changing anyone’s minds. Deep down they probably want to see Biden lose so they can spend the next four years feeling smug on the internet that themselves, the good upstanding liberals that are, advocated for Biden but those evil horseshoe tankies got Trump elected. The feelings of moral superiority is what they crave, but they also know the left has the morally superior position (and it kills them that we don’t even care about being “morally superior”).

Edit: I want to tell one of these nerds who makes these charts: “Death to America, I love humanity infinitely more than I do this country. So add a few foreign policy issues like “forcing Ukrainians into a meat grinder”. Then weight domestic versus foreign issues in proportion to the population of the US versus RoW, and then see how the points shake out.

I have to admit, I don’t get the suit coat with no (visible) shirt. Not a criticism, just an observation.

went to great pains to point out how Israel was not an apartheid state because a single muslim woman was working as a tour bus driver

Unsurprising to no one, but they clearly have no idea how apartheid worked in South Africa.

In the United States? Basically none. There are still quite a few “liberal” Protestant churches, but they pretty much stay out of politics entirely. They will do good stuff like help the poor and be accepting of LGBTQ people, but they don’t go beyond that. But nothing that could be called a “movement”. There was this one church in either Atlanta or Detroit, I don’t remember, where they were starting to formulate a very Marxist-sounding doctrine focused on debt forgiveness… but that was literally just one church and they collapsed when there was a scandal among the three pastors that led it involving harassment.

What has helped Christianity endure for 2,000 years is how malleable it is. You can make “Christianity” about anything. Under feudalism it was useful to the nobility for legitimizing their power over the serfs and for keeping the serfs in line. The theological basis for Christianity comes down to what’s in the Bible and what “church tradition” teaches… and those two bases can be made to say whatever you want it to. It’s well known how very little the Bible says about trans people, for example. Or how the only thing the Bible says about abortion is how to perform one. And for people raised in evangelicalism, it’s actually shocking to realize just how little the Bible condemns premarital sex (it basically doesn’t) when it’s such a foundational pillar of growing up in the church. Today in the US, white evangelical Christianity (and really white Catholicism too, now that white catholic minorities like the Irish and Italians have been fully integrated) exist simply to prop up white supremacy and settler colonialism.

So you have this incredibly malleable religion that easily serves power via the base-superstructure relationship. Of course, that means one day Christianity could be a force for good - under communism at least. But as long as we live under a capitalist base Christianity will pretty much only reflect that.

But if you’re interested in trying something yourself, you can try reading up on Karl Barth. IIRC he tried to incorporate dialectics and German philosophy into Christianity. I got into him for a minute before I deconverted, I think there’s stuff there that’s Marxist-friendly, even if that wasn’t Barth’s intention.