Chicago Police and the FBI are investigating if saboteurs placed bugs in a breakfast buffet prepared for delegates at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday.
“Multiple unknown female offenders are alleged to have entered a building…and began placing unknown objects onto tables containing food,” the convention’s information center said in a statement. “The offenders are believed to have then left the area. One victim was treated and released on-scene. Along with CPD, FBI-Chicago is assisting in the investigation.”
Do I think the DNC are scum who silence Palestinians and support Israel like nearly everyone else in US politics does?
Yes.
Huh, I suppose if you do support Palestine, you can’t be a DNC delegate?
Of course not, you simply shouldn’t be a DNC delegate if you support Palestine. Because they’ll point at these delegates and use them as props to say “see, we’re listening to Palestinians” while not changing course.
These are not ordinary voters, these are sometimes local politicians but competing to run the same machine as their more successful national counterparts. These individuals have some degree of power and influence, and they’re choosing to use it for the American Empire.
Zero pity for these turbo-losers getting bugs in their food. Admittedly, making “putting bugs in food” a popular protest tactic doesn’t set a great precedent considering the food safety implications for everyone else, but food safety concerns are NOTHING compared to what Palestinians are suffering at the delegates’ party’s hands.
You are making this the ONLY issue in the world. I fucking hate the israeli government for what they are doing. Fuck israel. But you are willing to let everyone around you burn for this. Willing to let lgbt, people of color, students, poor people and the working class be oppressed and possibly murdered. Because trump WILL make sure of that.
Sounds like what’s happening right fucking now under a Democrat presidency!
How many times do you have to try to kick Lucy’s football before you realize that she’s punking you?!?
Voting for President merely ratifies decisions already made by capital. I’m not voting for your candidate, and I refuse to be guilted for decisions already made by capital.
Trump winning would be an indicator of the trajectory you have no control over as far as the ballot box is concerned.
No I am not. I want people to organize themselves against the system, not within it. The system itself is the problem. Having “”“good people”“” is insufficient to get even mediocre change. See self-described socialist AOC speedrunning ghoulification.
Most of us are not organizing within the system to fix it. We are voting as a way of putting our foot on the breaks while we organize outside of it. The train is going fast. Trump accelerates it and Harris makes it go slower.
Voting does not mean we are organizing inside the system. Its a half baked measure we use to our advantage.
Nobody is saying Harris will stop or reverse the train. But we are not going accelerate the train and hurt even more people than it already is. We are privileged to be hanging off the sides instead of laying on the tracks like many many others.
I got no beef with people voting for Democrats in the general election, even though I disagree with their choice, because it doesn’t affect the outcome of anything. My beef is with these delegates, these people in a position of influence and power.
Of course we shouldn’t accelerate the “train”, I cannot stress enough that I agree with that statement and that accelerationism is bad, but it is my view that
I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
What, in your view, needs to be done?
Indigenous Action did a great write-up on this topic. Although to be completely honest, the point of this thread was really to condemn the DNC delegates specifically. Actually, I brought up voting at all in this thread in response to the suggestion that I am:
As a poor grad student, and sibling to two lovely LGBT POC for whom I would literally kill to protect, this is a particularly offensive implication (from a different user!) that I often see bundled with pro-electoralism rhetoric, so I preemptively brought in Colin Ward’s article against voting.
In the large, abolish all authority and hierarchy by popular revolution. If that is impossible, then approximate it as best as possible in the real world using a basis of popular liberatory actions emulating the end goal.
In the small, these delegates could use their power to physically and logistically disrupt the DNC until at least the US ending weapons transfers is secured. For everyone else, support protesters for Gaza in your life, show up to the protests if you can, do direct actions [1] if you can … do nothing if you have to, but most importantly, don’t cooperate with the war machine!
I hope this clarifies what I meant by saying:
Because while voting doesn’t necessarily hurt direct action efforts [2], it doesn’t help either. It’s just a completely independent class of activity. It’s like if, on a typical x-y plane (where the x and y axes are assumed to be orthogonal), we need to move in (let’s say) the positive x direction, and people keep spamming inputs in the y direction.
[1] Just the first part of section J.2, not including J.2.1 and onward. The rest is supplementary.
[2] There is an argument to be made (and I believe the article I cited makes it) that activism for voting takes time and energy that would otherwise be spent on direct action. Also, technically speaking, voting does literally take time away from direct action for the amount of time you’re waiting to vote and actually in the booth, but I’m an engineer so I’m willing to neglect small-valued terms 😆.