Instead of complaining, get active at a local level. Start doing shit, instead of complaining that other people should do shit. Be a local activist. Run for office. Work in person to persuade people. Get backing. Shake hands, kiss babies, meet people. And then? Vote for the best choices that you have.
If you want shit to change, you can’t complain on-line, you have to get off your ass and do something.
I assume that you aren’t doing more because almost all of the people bitching about the Dems only aligning with 95% of their views and therefore don’t vote for the Dems because they’re just as bad are accelerationists; they just want to make the system function even less well than it already does so that the whole things crashes and burns. Or, worse, in the case of someone like Jill Stein, are actively working against the interests of the country. Best case scenario? They’re speaking to an in-group to harden people in a position so that they’re less likely to engage with political opponents.
If you really, truly want things to change, you gotta do that shit on a 1:1 basis, in person. If you’re serious about changing people and fixing shit, I’d suggest looking at techniques of street epistemology and reading David McRaney’s “How Minds Change”.
It’s one of the things I do. You don’t know anything else about me, but you seem to think you do. All I know about you is that you can turn any subject into a conversation about yourself.
You can. But you need to engage them one on one, and you need to find out what’s important to them, what frustrates them, and why. And then build on that. It takes empathy, and not faked empathy. It’s not a short conversation, like asking someone to donate to Greenpeace on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. It’s deep canvassing.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”
One-on-one might be effective, but it can’t scale. There’s no hope for the most heavily propagandized country on Earth that doesn’t start with an end to the incentive to lie for profit, I.E. Capitalism.
For the most part, people change based on relationships, not raw information. In general, you can’t counter a belief simply by presenting overwhelming information. (This is one of the only areas where Trump is a savant; he’s actively fostered a parasocial relationship with his cultists. They believe that they have a strong social relationship with him, so they’re inoculated against information that’s critical or negative of Trump.) What this means is that ideas can be contagious, and can spread through relationships. If you are able to use you relationship with your parents to help them understand why e.g. Trump is terrible for the country, then they can, in turn, spread that to their friends.
While I appreciate your desire to abolish capitalism, in the case of fascism, it’s not money, but power that’s at play. Even if you eliminated all profit motive, people would still shill for Trump because they think that they can get some kind of benefit that isn’t necessarily monetary.
Money and power are equivalent, hence my identification of the problem as Capitalism. Billionaire-owners who can afford to run a propaganda machine as a loss-leader are also to be abolished.
That’s not the point. People aren’t saying that they’d rather have Trump in charge. The point is things will never get better if everyone keeps unquestioningly giving their votes to the Democrats regardless of how little the democrats represent their interests. The only real way most people have of making a political party change is by withholding their votes until that party changes in order to regain the votes.
This is not a winnable situation. This is a two party system with a lesser of two evils option.
But we cannot consistently remain on the edge forever. If we pass over that line. And we have trump next year, it will be our last election.
We’ll either have a civil war and finally revise the system or end up like Russia.
Alternatively we can stay on the edge a little longer and build up a different strategy. Maybe A third party that only runs non-president candidates nationwide. Running in off elections and non-presidential yearsto gain seats and national trust. Maybe reforming local laws to make PACS less effective to avoid situations like the current one.
It’ll be slow and not ideal, but it’s a better chance at improving things then flipping the switch and having the dictatorship now.
Either way Palestinians die because we don’t get a say in that. And to end off this little rant.
Biden is enabling the genocide because his PACs have his hands tied. Trump would be cheering on the genocide because his PACS and his base would support him for it.
Theres the Fascist who will keep the veil of democracy on and avoid total outright Fascism or the Fascist who will burn democracy to the ground and have outright Fascism.
Voting for anyone else is at best throwing your vote in the garbage and at worst voting for the greater of two evils.
This was never an issue of “Voting for the good guy” that hasn’t been an option for as long as I have been alive. This is an issue of biding time to build up a strong enough third party, and we don’t even have a strong enough third party to have a presence in congress or the senate
Buying time for what?! The instant Biden got into office you all went back to brunch. All that did was tell the rest of the world “we don’t care how much you’re suffering, as long as we get to be comfortable we are going to continue to sit on our throne of blood”
So congratulations, now the world doesn’t want to support you this time. Good job on that.
The Presidency is one person, with increasingly too much power.
Unions have been exploding in popularity, various local elections have been swinging farther left than the standard democrat playbook.
The people are not voting democrat because they are content with them, they’re voting democrat because there is not another viable option.
It needs to start local and grow. We need a proper left-wing party, if we can ever get organized enough to do such a thing rather than relying on what already exists.
And as I said, I think the best course of action is a measured approach. Local Elections, Off-year elections and non-presidential elections. Grow in numbers, gain public confidence and start snowballing.
The reason why third parties are progressively weakening is because of a lack of faith, and third party’s consistent decimation in the presidential is a big part of it.
Its counter intuitive, but voting third-party hurts third parties in the long run if you focus on them primarily during presidential elections.
I’m not the standard “Oh the third party will never win type.” I’m actively against trying to run before we can walk.
Confidence is a big deal in elections. It’s more obvious in Primaries. If people see a candidate they like in the Primaries, but they don’t think they can win against the opposition candidate, they will not vote for the candidate they like. They will vote for the candidate that they have the most confidence in even if they don’t like that candidate.
We need to start a from the ground up political party that’s entire focus is to stay out of the view of presidential elections, We need to start focusing on bringing Ranked Choice Voting to as many locations as possible. And it will be a long process. But it’s far better than repeatedly doing the same thing every election cycle.
We always have the situation of 99% evil vs 100% evil both with a roughly 50/50 chance of winning and a selection of third party candidates who are decent but have 0 chance of winning.
Third party candidate loses, 99% or 100% evil wins. Third Party yet again becomes less relevant and less considered. Repeat. This cycle can only end if we stop focusing on the obvious losing strategy.
I used Dall-E to generate the individual elements and put them together in Paint.NET. AI couldn’t understand the prompts I was using well enough to generate what I wanted.
Lol cool. It reminds me of 2016 when I checked the Republican party website and on the Donate page the background was a picture of Trump. Then I checked the Democratic party website and on the Donate page the background was a picture of Trump but with a scary red hue.
Why would we continue doing the exact same thing that has been time and time again proven to be a cheap bandaid that never addresses the issues? Fuck that. We have to try different ways of making progress in this country or we’re fucked. We’re not really a democratic country anyway. None of our representatives actually fight and do what we ask of them. So why fall for it again?
Citizens of the US are really screwed, with a pseudo-democracy where they can only choose between conservatives or fascists, apart from practically half of the population who show that Descartes was wrong, because they exist but they don’t think.
Biden sucks… but vote for him. I mean the two party system sucks, first passed the post sucks, gerrymandering sucks… but the republican party sucks even more. I’d rather have a dottering old liberal than an outright fascist, and at the same time the system won’t be reformed because of an election cycle. People need to organise, get off their lazy butts. But since you ain’t doing that, there’s only one thing to do.
Vote Biden. Don’t be dumb. It’s like the only sane alternative, no matter how insane that sounds.
Trump would’ve done the exact same thing. You’re not minimizing any damage your regime is facilitating a literal genocide. The fact that you’re keep trying to minimize this fact because it’s your fascist in office shows how utterly morally bankrupt you are.
The immediate response to the war would probably have been the same, but another 4 years of Trump would have meant more time to inflame tensions in the region even worse with actions such as:
Biden has continued all the same policies and has also dragged the world into a proxy war against Russia while continuing to escalate tensions with China. Biden is a lunatic whose actions continue to bring the world closer to a world war.
Pretty sure it was literally Russia who started that war.
Edit: Sorry, meant to say ‘special operation’. This is how states operate now. It fucking sucks. It all fucking sucks. Everyone fucking suck. Throwing shit at each other is no way it’s going to stop. People need to pull their heads out of their ass as point fingers at the people who actually put this shit together. The entire world economy is tired to oil and guns. As long as oil and guns reign supreme, so will war.
Meanwhile, people who put this all together are the ones running the empire, and as long as Americans keep voting for the lesser evil nothing’s going to change.
Meanwhile, Stoltenberg finally admitted that the reason the war started was because of NATO expansion
Your link does not support that. It literally states that Putin wanted to completely veto NATO expansion, which he has no right to do. In retaliation for not caving to his absurd demands, he declared war on Ukraine. All of this are actions by Putin and could only have been prevented by Putin. He started the war, nobody else.
Stopping NATO expansion would be an absurd demand if Russia did not have the power to stop do so by force which is what it’s now doing. Russia gave NATO a choice of either stopping expansion to its borders, or resolving the situation by force. NATO chose to resolve the situation by force. The whole narrative that Putin started the war and nobody else is beyond infantile because it just ignores all the history and geopolitical context pretending as if this was some random event that happened out of the blue and for no logical reason.
NATO has maintained a policy of might makes right since the fall of USSR, it has invaded and razed numerous countries over the past few decades, and now it’s run into a country that will no longer tolerate an aggressive military alliance on its borders.
NATO did not fire a single shot during this war. Russia was the one who started all the shooting. Not to mention that Ukraine is a sovereign nation that gets to choose if it wishes to associate with NATO. Russia decided to use force to prevent Ukraine from doing that.
There is no history or geopolitical context here that justifies Putins invasion of Ukraine. To claim anything else is an endorsement of Putins flavour of fascism, where he is literally saying that Russian might makes right. It’s insane how deluded you are to literally draw the opposite conclusion from facts that do not support your arguments at all.
The whole point of a proxy war is that you use somebody else to do the fighting for you. Meanwhile, Ukraine lost its sovereignty back in 2014 when a democratically elected government was overthrown in a western backed coup. Painting this as Ukraine freely choosing to associate with NATO is the height of intellectual dishonesty.
Meanwhile, bleating about justifications is just a distraction from the reality of why the war happened. Pretty hilarious of you to run around calling others deluded while spewing utter nonsense. One thing that’s abundantly clear here is that you don’t care one bit about the actual facts. You’re an ideologue regurgitating propaganda you’ve memorized.
Meanwhile, Ukraine lost its sovereignty back in 2014 when a democratically elected government was overthrown in a western backed coup. Painting this as Ukraine freely choosing to associate with NATO is the height of intellectual dishonesty.
You are ignorant of the facts. The democratically elected Ukrainian parliament adopted a treaty for closer association with the EU, which Yanukovich tried to block. After sending snipers to fire at protestors against his deeply unpopular decision, the Ukrainian parliament voted by a large majority to remove Yanukovich from his post. There is no evidence of Western involvement here, and the only nation that spoke of a “coup” was Russia, as Putin lost his ally in Yanukovich. All of this happened through democratic votes, by a democratically elected governing body.
And one of the first things the interim government did? Hold new elections. How did Putin respond? By sending in troops and illegally occupying Crimea. And in Donetsk and Luhansk the pro-Russian separatists tried everything to disrupt the elections and deprive the Ukrainians there of their democratic right to vote.
Had Yanukovich decided not to send in snipers, the protests would have happened without bloodshed. Had Putin decided not to send in troops, there would not have been bloodshed. Every single time the decision to use violence was taken by Putin or one of his allies.
You’re an ideologue regurgitating propaganda you’ve memorized
Rich coming from someone who only regurgitates Russian talking points verbatim.
No, I’m not ignorant of any facts. And this has been extensively documented in western media. archive.ph/BAxYc
The regime that got in power started doing these kinds of things to people of Donbas, as was openly reported by CNN at the time.
Now, let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
Turns out that the civil war started exactly where the current line of contact is, and it started precisely because the nationalist regime the west installed started doing ethnic cleansing.
Rich coming from someone who only regurgitates Russian talking points verbatim.
Ah yes, Russian talking points as reported by western media. You’re an utter clown.
You know, when Biden took office the capitol building had literally just been attacked by a violent mob who smeared shit on the walls. And we were still in covid-lockdowns, and gas was $4 a gallon, and Ukraine had just started getting attacked.
Idk why Biden gets so much shit, but given where he started, I think we are doing a damn fine job and our inflation numbers are much better than most of the rest of the world.
What’s that? Somebody thinks that a different president is going to stop the drones and bombings!? Like they’re not tied up in deals?! Like if a third party candidate won the process would just magically stop?!?!
Bush made the bombs drop, Obama made the bombs drop, Trump made the bombs drop, Biden made the bombs drop… wtf do you think the next president will do? The CIA tells them what’s what and that’s it.
Vote Biden, or get a republican president. Your call.
The faster USA collapses, the faster a possibility would be created for tearing down the 2 party Deep State terrorist system, rebuilding America, and ushering in socialism without leftover crusty poisonous bread crumbs like Bernie Sanders.
It is better for a Republican to accelerate the process that Democrats will eventually lead to, regardless of the quality of copium Americans smoke.
I know. This was clapback to all those who think the notion of voting third party does anything else but taking away votes from the democrats. It’s naive, it’s dumb, it’s quite frankly ignorant. Change in power dynamics happens from the ground up, not the top down.
I mean, that's a weird-ass AI prompt. But if fascism wins and you voted third party, yes - it's partly* your fault unless you're too stupid to understand how first past the post voting works.
*conditionals against massive fascist party majority states notwithstanding.
If your goal is to have a third option to vote for, the best way to help is to support independent candidates on the right as well. If the fascist vote is split (say between Trump and Liz Cheney) then a vote for (Cornell West for example) is less likely to be a vote for fascism.
Third party candidates will never be the answer. They exist only to dilute resistance. The answer is to raise awareness and outrage until it can’t be ignored.
While I agree third party candidates are not really the solution, what exactly is rage and outrage that can’t be ignored gonna do? How is that gonna change things? Do you think the lawmakers and people in power and gonna just gonna fix the system that put them in power just cause some people got mad? More importantly changing all that would take time, way more time than we have before the next election, so what do you recommend we are suppose to do right now?
Please be a bit more specific than “get mad”, cause trust me, a lot of people have been mad for a long time, just getting mad doesn’t fix anything
We were on the verge of forcing real change before the neolibs convinced the middle class that they won by electing Biden. The people in the streets fighting cops is always the beginning of change. Spreading information, and not accepting the premise that Biden is the solution is how we get people back in the streets.
If one is a leftist and wants a third party just so we’ll be represented at all, then supporting right wing independents could backfire. Their corrupt corporate moderates are costing the right just as much support as they cost us. There’s a lot of religious folks out there who - if united - would usher in the Handmaid’s Tale.
Ross Perot came very close to actually winning. In today’s climate, a far right candidate just might.
Just curious… In what way did Ross Perot come close to winning? I see that he got 8% of the popular vote in 1996 but I’m not seeing that he ever got an electoral vote.
Maybe you’re misreading my intention. The image is supposed to convey that the Democrats use Republicans as a threat so they can stay in power, and the frayed rope represents them losing control. What did you think I was trying to say?
That’s an actual liberal stance I see thrown around way too often so without a /s or some other explicit commentary I can understand why the post would be taken at face value or without assuming there’s an implied sentiment.
The fact that you think that image accurately depicts liberal ideology is enough to dismiss this out of hand. A moment-in-time choice of vote is as indicative of an ideology as comparing weather to climate. And equating the vote against literal fascists, openly and with pride working to dismantle the republic and install an autocracy, as being a scare tactic just to stay in power is as small-minded as I seem to, disappointingly, expect from the internet.
But I understand all that if you’re spoon-fed that from your choice of news outlets, it gives you less to think about and more to “meme” about.
Where do you see any news outlets expressing that the Republicans are the threat used by Democrats to control the population? Even your attacks are disingenuous.
I never once said anything about “control the population.” Clearly you are doing exactly what idiot conservatives do — make shit up. Have fun living in the bubble of nonsense and intellectual mediocrity.
I didn’t say you said that. Work on your reading comprehension. The idea that the Republicans are the threat used by the Democrats to control the population is the basis of MY meme.
That’s what I thought you meant, the image implies they’re the same thing wearing different masks. The elephant is the weapon, the donkey is the one using it. In other words, a one party system pretending to be two.
What? I’m really not into us politics and also it’s pretty clear that the two party system is shit, but I never got the feeling that the two parties are similar in any way?
Please inform me of the method by which one can vote for “SOME Democrats” without also implicitly consenting to be represented by the rest of the party.
And also, why you think your time is better spent trying to convince a hypothetical single-issue voter to capitulate than calling the Dems and demanding they do better.
Exactly. There is no alternative. This is a hostage situation.
And when the guy holding you hostage asks you to pick which of your kids he should murder first, the right move isn’t to vote for the “lesser” evil, but to spit in his eye.
Neither party represents my interests and, as you’ve seen, the “lesser evil” argument doesn’t motivate me in the slightest. If you want me to vote for Dems then you’ll have to make them worth voting for and stop acting like they can coast to victory on fear of the Republicans alone.
I’m aware of FPTP and its mathematical implications, our country is designed to provide only the appearance of democracy while actually limiting choice to those candidates the parties deem inoffensive to their campaign financiers. And we’re stuck with them unless you can convince the two-party state to abolish the leverage it has over third parties, so stop acting like they’ll let you vote your way out of this situafion.
Real change would require a political revolution, and I’ve long since lost my faith that Americans would build something less fascist given the chance.
And there it is. The dumbest thing I’ll read all day.
Let me know when the 2 party stranglehold allows you to vote it out. Until then you’ll sit high atop your bullshit mountain preaching on the internet, whining on and on about how things should be.
Meanwhile, completely oblivious that you and people like you are exactly the reason why we don’t have enough voting power to enact real change.
Let me know when the 2 party stranglehold allows you to vote it out.
You’re the one insisting I don’t have a choice here. Why should anyone bother helping reinforce a system designed to disenfranchise them? To keep the “wrong people” from taking power, as if that wasn’t already the case?
If that sounds like Accelerationism to you, then you’re reading me correctly. Preservation of the intolerable status quo only delays and inflames the inevitable upheaval.
Meanwhile, completely oblivious that you and people like you are exactly the reason why we don’t have enough voting power to enact real change.
Oblivious?
No, I’m counting on it. The Democrats won’t change unless they have to, and people like me are the ones they need to change for. People like you, who “vote blue no matter who”, can be safely ignored by party leadership since they know you’ll vote for them anyway.
Well unlike you suggest, I don’t vote blue no matter who, I vote blue because the other choice is demonstrably worse.
You wax eloquent about how things need to change and so you choose to do nothing, but what happens when you recruit enough lefties to your side that the right is able to establish the equivalent of a dictatorship via voter suppression, coups, etc? What then? At that point you are 100% fucked.
Are you one of these idiots who actively want a civil war? Because if so you can give that idea up, it isn’t going to happen.
You are the equivalent of an old man yelling at clouds to change their shape.
You say nothing ever changes, but it already has! Biden, while being not nearly the lefty I would like him to be, has done a fantastic job compared to what I expected. It may or may not occur to you that Biden so far has governed much more left that Obama did.
Well unlike you suggest, I don’t vote blue no matter who, I vote blue because the other choice is demonstrably worse.
I’m sure the party cares deeply about this justification, since that seems to be all they’re running on these days.
I remember back in 1984 when such a strategy was considered comical:
<span style="color:#323232;"> It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "I did," said Ford. "It is."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4)
</span>
You wax eloquent about how things need to change and so you choose to do nothing
Says the guy who thinks that repeatedly voting in a game that was rigged from the start isn’t “doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result”.
what happens when you recruit enough lefties to your side that the right is able to establish the equivalent of a dictatorship via voter suppression, coups, etc?
Non-fascists will be forced to accept that working within a system that’s designed to disenfranchise them can never produce a democratic government and join with the anti-fascists. The dictatorship is subsequently overthrown by popular action at the cost of many lives (which likely includes my own as a nonbinary person with left-wing politics). This creates space for a second constitutional convention to fundamentally reform the law of the land.
At that point you are 100% fucked.
We’ve been 100% fucked for longer than you’ve been alive, the only question is whether or not you’re comfortable with the current rate of fuckery and what you’re willing to risk to change it.
Are you one of these idiots who actively want a civil war?
Lol, of course not. I have merely accepted that nothing short of a second American Revolution could overthrow the two-party system and that things will definitely get worse before they can get better.
Hell, I predicted this way back in November 2016. Trump’s win would galvanize the Democrats in 2020, and the subsequent lack of meaningful change depresses the vote enough that 2022 and 2024 go to the republicans. Trump then punishes his percieved enemies while the Democrats continue to chase Republican voters to the right, further fracturing their own left-wing base.
The Democrats and Republicans work together to make sure you don’t have any meaningful choice. The Republicans don’t know that they’re being controlled because they have only the politics of hatred and destruction. Democrats keep them around for the appearance of civility.
Saying the Democrats control the republicans is silly but saying that they use the republicans as a threat to stay in power is indisputable. They literally funded pro trump candidates in republican primaries under the assumption they would be easier to beat in the general election.
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