Depressing how as soon as a new election rolls around 80% of people left of Warren forget that the democrats didn’t do anything as “harm reduction” last time around. Hopefully it ends soon :doomer:
You can see the thought-terminating logic here.
Okay there is a crisis. We need Democrats to have all the power so they can solve the problem. Therefore we need to vote in more Democrats. Okay, so what are Democrats currently in power doing to help bolster voting turnout? Nothing of course. They can't. They're being held up by bad actors. The only hope of overcoming gerrymandering and other dirty tricks is to just get so many people to show up that the other side can't cheat their way into power. This creates a burden of action on voters instead of the people currently in power. If they lose their elections, it's people's fault for not turning up to vote. We failed the politicians, they didn't fail us.
The answer is for the people currently in power to cheat as well. They need to do the dirty tricks to gain more power. Yes, voters also need to do stuff like mass strikes and protests. Ideally, the people protesting would also be the ones assuming power. But that's why people fall into this logic. Revolutionary action, or even basic political action, is not in their tool set. They can't solve problems using those things because they don't exist. Those are things bad groups like 1/6 insurrectionists and the authoritarians of history use. The only tool is voting and being disgruntled on social media. Your radicalism is expressed purely through cultural affectations. You create a political aesthetic that genuflects to liberalism but is okay with using leftist language. You can express socialist desires but never dare to actually attempt to gain political power to carry out those desires lest you become authoritarian.
One time on :reddit-logo: I half-jokingly suggested banning the GOP like the nazis and the overwhelming response was "that would be authoritarian!"
I responded: "So we agree: The Democrats are authoritarian by nature, but hiding it so they can get elected."
"If you're going to call republicans the taliban for like eight years, I want you to handle them the same way"
all those trans drone pilots the libs are recruiting have an incredible opportunity
makes you wonder what kind of command overrides they have on those drone systems if someone goes rogue
:this:
I realize I'm a little privileged because I get to vote for a queer socialist to represent me in every local election, but all Ameicans should be voting in local elections. Also, if you live in a state that has whomever PSL rolls out every four years on the ballot you can actually say you voted for a communist.
100%
"Voting is not enough. It is also necessary."
This is an all hands on deck, on all fronts situation. Don't take one approach to the problem: take every approach.
I think they should add an amendment to the Electoral College system where if you don't live in a swing state, it's illegal to tweet out the word "vote". Pro-voting or anti-voting who cares, spend an afternoon performing a symbolic gesture if you like
I voted for stupid ass Hillary Clinton in 2016 and she got more votes than the other guy but it didn't matter cuz I was one of a few million people that voted in the wrong states, then in 2020 I wrote in La Riva which also didn't do anything
Maybe if you live in Wisconsin or whatever this is worth talking about but I bet millions of New Yorkers and Californians are wasting hours of their life every year yelling about elections (including me but whatever)
nah it's not even work talking about in wisconsin. wisconsin needs to clean out the gerrymandered state house. probably with blood.
Who the fuck am I even supposed to be voting for? Biden has been genuinely worse than Trump.
I guess the candidate you think will be less able to manage the empire outside the US
The US needs a president willing to negotiate with every nation instead of acting unilaterally for domestic politics. The only hope of curtailing the imperial abuses of NATO or any of the other Western defensive pacts is to subsume them into a larger security framework with China, Russia, African Union, etc. That is going to take someone like FDR or LBJ in quality, so we are probably pretty fucked.
Old school take-and-hold-lands Imperialism like in Ukraine 2014-? and Afghanistan 2000-2020 show that it doesn't really work that well in the modern era. The proliferation of cheap force multipliers like Stingers and Javelins make holding lands wickedly costly for invading forces. China spent decades slowly building out their blue water navy, and now their fleet is more modern and more numerous than even Russia's .
Maybe China will be the adult in the room and offer security frameworks to cool down tensions. That would be the smart play. China spent trillions building infrastructure while the US and Russia wasted trillions in imperial quagmires. That is the way forward. Not building drone fleet carriers with lasers or whatever the DoD is wasting money on now.
Honestly I was just hoping for an idiot who would mess up US attempts to retain hegemony with incompetence I don't believe the US esstablishment will let someone like you're describing through the cracks
A lot of progress towards internationalism for the working classes has been co-opted by transnational defense companies.
I don't think the defense companies would let an executive in any NATO country attempt to do the sane thing and work towards comity with peer-level partners like China, India, AU. Too much lucre is flowing. Building infrastructure for the proles doesn't make enough billionaires like making killer robots does.
building infrastucture was what allowed capitalism to initially take off the rail networks were pivotal to their transitions into world powers. In America it allowed a vast continent to be truly connected and for the entire impperial core it made it so coal and goods could be rapidly transported and used in industry.
Infrastructure of the imperial core is vastly important for the health of the empire. The Romans weren't building roads for kicks after all. Neoliberalism is in some ways destructive to capitalism's ability to compete on the world stage as it turns capitalism's consumption on the mechanisms of the state which are needed to enforce it's will. A bit like an ouroboros.
transport and energy infrastructure might not be directly part of the military industrial complex but ultimately what's bad for the industrial complex is bad for the military industrial complex. And a lack of infrastructure is not good for industry
It's so stupid that these libs lived through 2008 to 2022 and saw that when dems had a majority or a super majority they still couldn't codify roe v wade. If you couldn't do it with 60 votes in the senate, and no one wants to change the vote threshold (which they do ALL THE TIME) for it, then voting for more dems isn't going to help. What, they're going to get >10 new senators and hold on to everything else they have?? Because 60 wasn't enough last time...
Obama headlines Planned Parenthood fundraisers with paid speeches when he did jack shit to save Roe.
That is the current Democratic establishment.
Most of the libs living through that time aren't even aware of all that and just remember that the Obama years was when gay marriage was legalized.
We need to start hijacking the phrases of liberal democracy and turning them into dog whistles for violence.
And then somebody should elect Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the rest. Elect them right in the head. Preferably on live television.
What I wouldn't give to bring some liberal democracy to Clarence Thomas
paying cash for a white van to do my civic duty in a parking garage under the New York Times building
(joke post. obviously white panel vans are the most stereotypically suspicious vehicle in existence. much better to use a silver or brown beater sedan)
Panel vans are sus, rock up in one of those surplus tanks instead.
I think they're legally required to dump concrete in the main gun, sadly.
When anti-homeless policies deny us public restrooms, we have to resort to extreme measures for our civic doody
Voting is useless and you should still do it, plus X Y & Z
~some centrist bigbrain, probably :lenin-walenin:
voting is useful when there's something worth voting for. i really don't think i'm setting a high bar, i'm not even asking for the dems to become a revolutionary party of the working class. i want them to give me a reason to do something inside the voting booth besides write in AVGN for all seats and jack off on the ballot. it's not a purity test, I'm just not dumb enough to snort pure flour.
Right like I didnt vote for Biden but my state has a current D governor and the Republican candidate this fall has said that he would move to ban abortion if the Roe overturn happened. So obviously thats worth taking 5 minutes to vote to prevent that from happening, even if the democrat is some lame lib.
Voting in a liberal parliamentary democracy isn't useless in a vacuum or in various contexts. Voting dems in the American context is useless tho. Both as any hope or connection to advancing socialist goals and as rudimentary harm reduction even (when seen at timescales longer than a decade)
They also literally don't matter as the libs just pretend the gerrymandering doesn't exist instead of doing anything about it. I live in a blue metro, however I'm represented by a small red town like 80 miles away. It makes zero sense
Correct. If we take the logic of gerrymandering seriously, isn't every state basically gerrymandering? What is the difference between Alabama and Missippi or the rest of the southern states that makes them get an inproportional amount of votes?
Voting is a stupid and useless waste of time but I still do it in case I'm wrong.
I forget if I read it here or elsewhere, but someone said "Democrats are the Uvalde police of harm reduction." I think it's a good comparison.
I'll probably still vote this year but leave all offices above the county level blank
imo undervotes are a pretty good way to get "fuck you" to show up on the totals
