Only Felix had a few good words for it - the rest retreated into lame doomed crap as though it’s only theatre.
Fuck that! Make Pelosi sweat! Fuck shit up and push hard now, while public support for M4A is peaking.
Only Felix had a few good words for it - the rest retreated into lame doomed crap as though it’s only theatre.
Fuck that! Make Pelosi sweat! Fuck shit up and push hard now, while public support for M4A is peaking.
I'm not crying, I'm just acknowledging reality. If you're pushing this as though it has some possibility of success, then you're just going to look bad when it fails (which it 100% will).
If you're pushing it while acknowledging that it has zero chance of success then I don't know how you expect to organize or anything around it. Might as well try to sell people on pushing a boulder up a hill and watching it roll down.
It's better to organize around something that has a nonzero chance of working.
Listening to your betters say “now is not the time” has a zero chance of success.
Cool so exactly the chance of success that this vote would have.
It has 100% chance of failure if you don’t challenge the likes of Pelosi.
It has a 100% chance of failure if you do challenge the likes of Pelosi too.
American lefties are so defeated after Sanders. I get it. You knocked on doors and phonebanked and donated and posted till you were saw, and all I could do was cheer you on.
I want to cheer you in a fight for one of many first steps to get M4A - ie basic civilisation.
A first vote loss would not be a failure. It would be one of many first steps. M4A will never happen if those first steps aren’t taken.
Also, I want to see Pelosi sweat blood. (I’m not trying to be fucking Jesus dammit). That won’t happen if she is never challenged.
It's not about being psychologically defeated, it's about acknowledging the reality of the political situation.
If it happens it'll be because we have a vote on it at a time when it can actually pass. Doing it now accomplishes nothing, and ss I said, it's not even good optics.
We all want Pelosi to sweat blood. But this isn't going to make that happen. She could hold agree to hold a vote and then kick back in a recliner and not watch the news for a week, confident that it will fail.
I'm not saying "Don't pressure Pelosi," I'm just saying "Don't waste political capital on stupid shit that accomplishes nothing."
Ok. So when would suit you to make those first steps that might not win immediately?
In a few years when the true force of this moment might dissipate?
Now is the moment.
By all means necessary.
These are not the first steps to anything. You're just assuming that this gesture will do something, but I see no reason to think it would.
Like, what the fuck is your strategy? I heard one person suggest a general strike for M4A, which would be very difficult, but at least it was an idea. Nearly everyone who weighs in on your side doesn't seem to have any sort of actual plan beyond forcing the vote and hoping things randomly work out somehow. And btw if we did go with something like a strike, that's something that would not require AOC to do any of this forcing a pointless vote crap.
Y'all always call me a defeatist or a nihilist or whatever but it seems to me like y'all are the defeatists. Like presumably you know as well as I do that this isn't getting past the senate, at the very least, yet you keep pouring energy into it anyway. Why not try a different strategy that might actually work instead of wasting time hoping and begging for ghouls to vote against their interests?
Force a vote then campaign like buggery - especially directed at the offices of those unlikely to support it.
Swarm their offices and their speaking events with sick, broke people needing care.
Make a big fucking deal of it.
Strikes require union leaders, and many of them are now supervising medical funds. Can you swarm their offices too? With people who were once members of their unions and are now sick and broke and need care?
Then fucking do that anyway! If you can leverage the power to get M4A passed by exerting power outside of electoral politics, then it doesn't fucking matter whether AOC negotiates to force a vote! Why the fuck would that whole campaign hinge on what AOC does?
I have not mentioned those three initials here, at all.
This is about me wanting to cheer on you guys in a fight.
Ah, I see. So we were talking about whether, I don't know, Ted Cruz should try to pressure Pelosi to hold a M4A vote. And hey, you know, I never actually used the words "Medicare for all" so this whole time I was talking about a program I call "Marshmallows for Albert." There's this guy Albert who I think really deserves some marshmallows, you see.
Silly
Yeah, it is pretty silly to play dumb and pretend that you're not talking about something that you clearly are just because you didn't say the words, isn't it?
Alright, so AOC is best placed to gather a group to force a vote. So what?
I think you lost the thread of the discussion.
The point is that if we have the power to apply enough external pressure to get M4A passed, then we can just use that pressure to get it passed regardless of some procedural nonsense.
Suppose, hypothetically, that there was a massive general strike that shut down the country, and politicians were left with no choice but to give in to demands. Or maybe we have a campaign capable of making serious primary challenges to anyone who votes against it. If that were to happen, then it wouldn't matter whether or not AOC had negotiated a floor vote or not, because we could make demands of Pelosi and the Dems directly.
So this stuff about "The vote can succeed, we just have to back it up with a movement" is kind of nonsense because if we could back it up with a movement then we could just do that regardless of whether AOC does what you want. Which is why it's dumb to have all these pointless discussions about a pointless vote instead of discussing actual plans that have more than a 0% chance of working.
Every Albert I know deserves marshmallows too.