Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say "Yeah but Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same" really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.
It would literally have changed the world. At this point we're scrabbling around from the outside desperately trying to get the leaders to care, when it's already too late for a lot of the semi-good outcomes. We missed a chance to have a guy in charge who understood the science, and cared a lot about it, back when there was some time to change the trajectory.
Edit: Now a bunch of different users have independently come to the conclusion that it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because the Republicans would have defeated anything he did in congress, and now they all want to share that message with all of us, as their current explanation for why it is that elections don't matter anyway.
(Edit 2: Guys. You get to vote for congress in elections, too.)
IDK, maybe I am reading too much into it and it really is a bunch of people who are motivated to post about politics, but whose brains are also just wired to search for defeatism wherever they can find it, and that's the message they want to share. Maybe.
Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it's true, saying "x is useless" is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
As someone who's guilty of thinking 'both sides are the same' I think you're definitely right.
For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.
It works pretty well, too. Sure there's still a two party situation going on, but recently the amount of votes not going to either is making it clear they're slowly losing voter confidence as the older generation fade out.
I think younger voters actually understand how important the senate is too and how powerful ranking it with some detail can be.
Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.
Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn't do already. You're massively overrating the impact one president has. It's not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn't pull that schtick until after he lost the election.
There's no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I'm actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.
Even if he didn't accomplish anything other than preventing the regression that happened under Bush, it would have allowed Obama and Biden to make more progress than they did.
If he did manage to accomplish anything, no matter how small, then Obama and Biden could have made even more progress.
Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they'd probably have impeached Gore for it.
Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that? Do you think industry won’t tie the change up in the courts for decades?
Yes, the executive can attempt these things but with two coequal branches, one of which swings between the parties pretty regularly every couple years, it wouldn’t stick.
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that?
Trick question! It's not up to the legislative branch to decide the limits of Executive authority. That's up to the supreme Court. Speaking of which, president Gore would have gotten TWO SEATS appointed.
One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.
Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.
And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
I'd also like to complain about the electoral college again. Anything but going by popular vote is anti-democratic. The American system is so damn infuriating to me and it's not even my country. But it affects us globally.
In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women's reproductive rights, and now in 24 they're angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can't see.
If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn't really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
Honestly, at least on Lemmy, I think a lot of the ass-headers are just a mixture of shills and edgelords. In what proportion, I have no idea.
The ratio of beliefs on the issue is very different among the people who are genuinely engaged with it, than among the people who quick post a punchy message or two and then scuttle away. There's just a lot of people coming in for a moment to do the second activity; that's the only thing that makes it seem like the opinion poll is as mixed as it looks like at first.
(I've been spending way too much time paying attention to this today.)
Lemmy is such a small market compared to others like reddit, twitter, and facebook. Two of them have gone full fox news. Reddit wants to but can't afford to lose any users. The battle for social media is over and the fact that disrupters even make their way to lemmy shows how far their reach is.
Russia and other bad actors are dragging the USA off its throne and their doing it from the inside. The GOP are like fully hopped up junkies at this point and if we tried to remove the mainline of the propaganda feeding their dilusion they'd just as well claw your eyes out.
Just sucks no one in our government is willing to do anything about it.
Edit: If I had one guess it would be that lemmy exists to push a red scare caricature version of a communism that's why you see all these communists with awful takes all the time. Some of them radicalized but mostly just bad actors trying to portray lemmy, one of the last hide outs for lefties, as radical communists.
Centrist Democrats will always blame progressive discontent for their losses, even if their losses are caused by the Supreme Court undermining democracy itself.
Quit moving to the right, and we'll quit pointing it out.
Yeah so what about Gore and climate crisis? We got a sweet ass pointless Iraq war with Bush. We got to do the most American thing ever, bully a small country for natural resources and stage a regime change. Would have Gore given us that? Pft no. We would have a serious conversation about climate and taken some steps to mitigate everything.
I've read that Ghengis Khan, while he was responsible for the killing of 20–40 million people, that actually resulted in the lowering of global CO2 levels and led to reforestation in many parts of the world. So maybe a little genocide every now and then helps... (I'm not seriously suggesting this)
A calm and rational discussion and response to 9/11 instead of making up lies, going on the war path, and telling allies that they're either with us or against us? Lame. Pass. (/s)
I honestly don't think Gore could kept the country out of Afghanistan. The public wanted justice for 9/11, by justice they wanted blood. The public would have forced Gore to do something about 9/11.
It would have been very easy for Gore to get sucked into Afghanistan even after trying to put forth rational explanations of why we shouldn't have occupied the country. The end result of would have been somewhat similar, 20 years of war, and nothing really accomplished.
The Iraq war on the other hand would have never happened on Gore.
There would also not have been an invasion of Iraq, things like Isis would have probably remained an unkicked hornet's nest.
License to torture at will would not have been granted to government goons.
The threat of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into iconic buildings would have been taken seriously. Which opens up the possibility that 9/11 could have been averted. Then maybe the mouth-breathers at TSA would not have been given the power to profile and harass at airports.
The list goes on: Katrina and New Orleans; the neutralizing of the Consumer Protection Bureau; the typically republican financial free-for-all that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Then there are Supreme Court appointments, which we get to keep for life, like goddamned herpes.
But since so many ignorant and smug lazy assholes stayed home on Election Day bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe, everybody got a succession of utterly preventable shit sandwiches.
I keep comparing Casablanca to New York City. One reason is that they're both the biggest cities in their respective country without being the capital, and that they suck, but also because before 2001, they both had twin towers (the ones in Casablanca are still standing btw).
Liberals would have "played it fair" and been all "across the isle" and appointed on "conservative" (reactionary corporatist) judge together with the corporatist judge they appoint.
Democrats could add more supreme court judges and run with that but they don't want to. They can not just run on "not trump" and win.
Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it's not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.
I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.
Oh for sure, he was following Clinton's lead, so that's why it's somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn't the case, or it at least isn't how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yes, I agree. I'm also not sure that running as a super environmental progressive would have been possible at the time. We were just coming out of the timber wars, where the timber industry had spent millions convincing the US that a few hippies chained to trees trying to prevent the last bits of old-growth redwoods from destruction were the problem.
It was a different time and we were very desensitized to the concept of hippy punching etc.
How high do you have to be to erase everything al gore did to prove he wanted to do something about climate change? Why are you rewriting history like this? It's preposterous
You're the one rewriting history. Al Gore didn't run on climate change. Ordinary voters don't give a single shit about climate change in 2000. There was never any chance Gore was going to spend his political capital on climate change legislation.
The most we would have gotten from him is more incrementslism on the topic, like we got from Obama and Biden. The op is utterly delusional for posting such garbage.
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process... or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn't he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a "modern" politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden's "then you ain't black" comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore's actual statement (which, of course, was not that he "invented the internet") was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he'd accomplished and the value of it. It's the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider "the curve").
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you're not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians' words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.
I think Obama's approach was to bypass the media, and reach out directly to the people themselves, even if through them. That way, the media dared not make fun of him. Ofc they did anyway, but quite often, it did not stick as a result.
Here I have to ignore Faux News b/c they just ruthlessly tried to tear him apart - e.g. a black kid dies by violence, and Obama sheds a tear in sympathy, and they accuse him of it being faked. Which even if so, so what? We should have, and demonstrate, sympathy to people - imagine if that were a competition, and he was winning it, rather than the exact opposite of that which is the reality that we had:-(.
So the more mainstream media made fun of Obama's pauses, and how white his hair had turned while in office. Obama himself played along, especially in the White House Correspondents speeches. Those were great relations:-D.
Somehow Gore never managed to do that. I imagine him more like an engineer (which I am myself), who might be technically quite proficient, but struggle at the more "people" aspects of the job. Nixon too in a fashion. The people want a JFK/Bill Clinton/Obama/Trump, they don't want someone who will actually get the job done, more's the pity:-(.
And now we have Biden, who similarly is quietly getting things done, though the media is eating him alive whenever/however they can. After that, whether in this upcoming election or the one after that, it'll be a GQP member - you just know that, b/c of Dems never winning successive elections in history. Rinse & Repeat.
UNLESS libs learn this lesson, finally, and put forward someone who is electable? It very much IS a popularity contest, no matter how much we may wish, demand, expect, or hope otherwise:-|.
The attitude of the Greek Stoics impresses me: we cannot impose our views upon the entire world, we can only change what WE can manage to change ourselves. Maybe that means skirting the government at the federal level - like individual states right now could pass protections against future anti-abortion laws, so why don't they? Or coalitions among cities could accomplish a lot - e.g. we can't force people to take vaccines, but we can work to make them cheap, effective, and available to anyone that will.
Navel-gazing back into the past does serve a purpose, but only to the extent that we learn from our mistakes as we move forward.
No, he didn't say he invented the Internet. What he did say was that as a young congressman he took the initiative to create the Internet, by providing the funding to expand the military's Arpanet for civilian usage - a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make since that is actually what he did. Literally months after Gore made this perfectly true and unremarkable statement, Bush advisor Karl Rove twisted it into "I invented the Internet". There is no "supposedly" about this.
that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do
Gore simply talked about one of his biggest accomplishments (perhaps the biggest accomplishment) of his long career as a politician. It is not reasonable to expect a Democrat to never mention the best parts of his record out of fear that the Republicans will twist his words - that will happen regardless.
a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him
The problem is he didn’t. Go back and look. Republican Party twisted his words and successfully made the twisted version into the popular narrative. That’s also a time tested political trick, but when it’s not what you actually said, you have no control over it.
The only thing that would have worked then was out-blustering his opponents, turn something else into the meme of the day..it’s a very powerful trick for getting elected, but really not one we should reward in a national leader
At the time you didn't have to be major disruptor like we need major disruption now. What you needed to do was move the needle, which could be done. Moving the needle early on drastically changes the path decades later.
There's also what you say during the election and what you do. I'm pretty sure Bush played it up (I'm amazed at what I see him say in old videos). Gore played down what he intended to do, or didn't make a big deal about it, because that's not what got votes at the time. So they may sound similar but not actually be similar.
Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could've been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn't have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might've had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.
People's votes are not weighed equally for the presidency, so that 'more' has a lot of work to do, unfortunately. Given the electoral college system for presidential elections that sentiment has to be qualified with "in the right places/districts".
Which is exemplary of the case that led to Bush v Gore deciding the election.
Climate Commitment. We’ve been screwed since the ‘90’s. Gore may have mitigated the warming, but a certain amount of warming would have occurred regardless, and will continue even if we achieve net-zero emissions. There is an amount of latent heat already trapped in the atmosphere. The warming we are experiencing now is from the early 2000’s.
I know. I suck. But the science is clear. We done screwed up. Much love to all.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they'll be able to actually do anything about it. The US government, and all governments to a greater or lesser extent, fundamentally serve capital and are beholden to the interests of capitalists.
No president, no matter how far to the left, could possibly save us. They will always delay action as long as possible, when not actively accelerating climate change. We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Voting does help, because a hostile government will systematically murder people who resist climate change while a "friendly" one will only imprison some of them. Voting is helpful, but not sufficient. We don't have any more time to waste begging for our lives.
Edit: also, he did win and then there was a coup. This was at least the third right wing coup in the last 60 years. So... Yeah...
And? Whet exactly is the point of this post? You might not get EVERYTHING you want, but you'll get SOMETHING, VS voting for assholes who'll actually be working AGAINST fixing the problem.
From civil rights, to healthcare, to climate, to pretty much any issue that matters Republicans will ONLY make it worse.
In my decades of living I have not seen Republicans offer a solution to a single issue. It's always just fear mongering and hate.
Until Trump the whole country had been getting steadily more progressive. We went from a Democrat signing an order to kick gays out of the military to legal gay marriage nationwide in just 20 years.
We were slowly getting better, and the GOP was fuming over it. When Obama won in 2008 despite the GOP putting up their most centrist, electable candidate in generations, they abandoned Democracy entirely and started burning everything down.
Occupy was under Obama. DAPL was under Obama. Prism was under Obama.
Obama did some good things, but he presided over the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in history. That was him. He facilitated the police crackdown on occupy. He facilitated the police attack on the Standing Rock tribe to push through the pipeline that ultimately poisoned their water. The NSA was caught actively spying on American citizens under Obama.
Republicans have been burning everything down since the 70's. That's not a new thing. Nixon carried out a coup and started the drug war specifically as a cover for political violence against his opponents, and people in his cabinet have literally admitted as much. Every fire Republicans have started, Democrats have tended.
Obama was probably the best president the US could elect, and the best he could do was pave the way for Trump. The problem is America. Republicans have been fascists for a long time, but Democrats have been paving their way and enabling them the whole time. The system is broken beyond repair. The best you can do with voting is delay the collapse. You have to organize outside of the system if you want to survive.
Since before Clinton housing, education and healthcare has gotten more expensive while wages have stagnated. The wealth gap has been expanding for years.
I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact the republicans are doing everything they fucking can to hurt democracy and Biden so they can say we told you so.... THE problem is the republicans that refuse to do their fucking job and represent the people of this country. Cancun cruz? That fucking zombie from Kentucky??? The dipshit in florida??? Gym fucking Jordan????? It's embarrassing.
That's basically what I said. The important thing here, that most liberals fail to understand, is that there will be no government solution. Ever. No matter who you vote for.
You have to actually organize and take direct action, not just beg for some authority to do something. Liberals tend to miss this. They just invest energy in getting people to vote, then they go to brunch. If you only focus on voting, you're not actively moving towards survival you're just delaying death. That's my point.
Great, but I literally said voting helps. Pointing to where I start saying "voting is not sufficient" and repeating something I said later doesn't add anything.
Can you explain to me why you felt this was necessary to say?
We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Great! Lemme just let the trans folks in my life know that alls we gotta do is elect the fuck who threatens to erase their existence entirely!
Bc the untenable systems at play in Russia, S Arabia, DPRK, RSA, etc. have done wonders towards the citizenry in those countries rising up and rebelling... oh... wait... thats right... its damn near impossible to rise up the closer your state is to the fascist mark. Congrats, ur right that the liberal system blows. Replacing it with something worse will only make things worse.
How successful have you been at bringing ur fellow comrades together to organize for direct action? And thats going to go better after we go full fascist?! After our minority allies are straight up outlawed?
You have the same level of comprehension for nuance as maga cultists. We are on the brink of fascism because liberals are useless.
But me? Oh, I organized an antifascist groups that organized one of the largest antifascist protests in the US the day after the murder of Heather Heyer, helped organize an antifascist self defence training group, I organized a police oversight group that de-anonomized thousands of complaints about police allowing for the identification of highly problematic officers, one of whom was fired after our efforts. I helped get the data for SPD.watch. I organized several public records request trainings. I started a food security committee that helped a bunch of people get food when they didn't have money, which expanded to canning food for houseless folks and supporting camps. oh, I also organized the protest where I was shot by a fascist. That and about a hundred other things, all of which I did with my trans comrades who were organizing for their own survival because they knew that liberals would not ultimately protect them.
What the fuck have you done?
Edit: your vote against murdering the trans folks is great, but you know what would help the people in your life when the voting eventually fails to stop fascism? Why don't you talk to them about what hormones they need and work on figuring out a plan to smuggle it in. As a cis person, you're the right person to risk yourself for them. Even today you could work with them to organize a safety group that they could call for support if they don't feel safe walking home or end up in an unexpected sketchy situation. You could organize a hate watch group to track fascist activities. You could do a ton of shit RIGHT FUCKING NOW instead of waiting to vote and then just seeing what happens.
Oh boy, let me try and reply here without losing my cool. If youre actually putting in effort into direct action, u deserve a serious reply. I have infinite respect for that, please keep that in mind as you read this.
You accuse me of a lack of nuance, while implying that i am against direct action and only favor voting, all in the efforts of getting upset at someone because they encourage others to vote and still ignoring the crux of their point. But its easier to compare me to maga. That way, the onlookers now know to side with u, after all u just egoized about all these wonderful things that i never told u not to do! This is hardly fostering comraderie between the working class. Please check my (admittedly short) comment history. I am in favor of always more direct action, but i am always against disparaging ppl ffom voting.
You say things like smuggle hormones, great. I am in favor, but guess what? That very word implies u are taking something from somewhere where it is legal, to somewhere where it is not. You are still beholden to the laws of wherever it is you are smuggling from. I.e. you need hormones to not be outlawed everywhere.
Im not trying to tell you your actions are useless. Far from it. Clearly u do more than most, certainly more than me, and i concede that. Your actions would only be more meaningful if done by more people. What i keep trying to hammer thru to all you other leftists pn here isnt to stop, but to simply understand that these efforts are NOT more easily undertaken in a system that is "untenable."
You didnt address that point for a reason. You complain about how awful libs are. Who? My shitty coworkers? The ones who believe in this system bc thats all they know and are exploited and taken advantage of and made to think their neighbors are the problem? 50+ yrs of very concerted propaganda have gotten them to this point. Hate em all you want, when u talk about the things that need to happen to topple the system, thats who you are depending on awakening. These same brainwashed folk who want nothing more than to end the day knowing their families are still provided for.
And again, look at the countries that do tend towards fascism harder than the States. Do you see more enlightened proles? More direct action? Because reality tends to disagree. Youre sitting here shitting on another leftist bc god forbid he votes, ur shitting on the liberals who perpetuate the shitty system we're forced into, but youre espousing values that all predicate on working together. Do you not see the dissonance there? We are NOWHERE near revolution, further still from utopia. We can cry that the climate is killing us, or that the system is too slow. Great. But right now, that system is only out to exploit you, not make your existence unliveable. If we get to that point, which under trump, it is likely, no amount of direct action is going to help. Not in a time when all the powers that be need do is take a look at their preferred mass surveillance system to find the rabble rousers and send out a drone or two to quell whichever protest gets to crazy.
Tldr: Thanks for your efforts, please dont disparage voting.
I literally said "Voting helps," and talked specifically about how it helps. At no point did I ever say not to vote. I even kind of said that I think people should vote. Why the do you think I'm telling people not to vote? Take a look at my post and ask yourself where this is coming from and maybe you'll understand why I'm calling you out.
I'm not saying anywhere, at any point, that people shouldn't vote. I'm not saying anyone is bad for voting. I'm not even hinting at the idea the voting is not at least a little helpful. I'm just fucking sick of everyone focusing on voting when it's one of the lowest valuable type of action you can take after canvasing and posting shitty memes.
I organized, I got shot, I kept organizing. The whole time I watched liberals tell queer and trans folks, black and brown folks, and all kinds of other marginalized folks and every intersection of those to vote harder any time they'd call out liberals. Liberals got Biden, stabbed radicals in the back, and went back to brunch. They had fucking years to organize, and instead they just got disappointed again and again by the failure of the system they believe in to address existential threats against it. Whenever they get called out for this shitty behavior, or whenever anyone points out that voting isn't enough, they hold up those same marginalized people they've been throwing under the bus between election years.
When I'm saying "make the system untenable" I'm meaning that you have to make oppression impossible by organizing. You have to make ecocide impossible by making it so expensive to extract petroleum that it stops being an option.
You think that you have to be close to revolution to make the system untenable? It took one person attacking an immigration facility to stop Trump's ethnic cleansing plan. Slavery didn't end because people voted against it. It ended because people formed a guerilla resistence that attacked plantations and smuggled people out, illegally. The civil war started because John Brown lead an armed assault on Harpers Ferry with the intent of creating an armed slave insurrection. They, and a lot of other people carrying out direct action, made the system untenable.
You know how they got to the point of making the system untenable? They organized. You should absolutely vote if your conscience lets you. I will shame you for not voting if you're as privileged as I am, but I won't if you're not. But for fuck sake, organize. Organize small groups. Organize too many groups to infiltrate. Go fill jails like XR until they can't afford to put people in jail anymore. Make this shit expensive. Organize locally to abolish free parking.Make perpetuating climate change so expensive that every oil company is forced to invest in renewables. That's what making the system untenable means. The fact that you jumped immediately to assuming I could only have meant something like "don't vote," even though I explicitly said voting has value, says something. Please take a minute to reflect on why you've spent this much time and effort arguing against something I did not say.
Very fair points, theres been a lot of ppl on this site yelling at me in a short period of time. I got a little fixated on making the system untenable bc in this very same thread theres no shortage of shitheads arguing against voting, all while countless other russian shills all across the web eg them on in hopes of enabling russian imperial interests.
Im just very frustrated, as i can tell u are. Im looking for leftists to come together regardless of how far left they swing. Ur points on making the system on tenable sound more like the types of direct action i seem to most believe in. Its about making life untenable for the capitalist owner class, not the poors foghting for their lives down below.
On that point tho, i still would urge you to find room for some more sympathy/empathy for those, erm- lets say, highly misguided poors still simping for the neoliberal way. With the amount of propaganda they consume, its no wonder they are the way they are, but that doesnt mean that theyre entirely lost. Ppl are fickle and change their minds drastically all the time, especially when their ego is in play. Ive gotten far right wingers to agree with me on dismantling insurance agencies, enacting a maximum wage, shit even to abolish currency altogether and trans rights. Its about how its presented to them, and by whom. Im not going to tell u to waste ur time convincing them actively, that is a waste of time.
But a newly found culture based on sympathy and kindness isnt necessarily all that far away. Anarchist theory is largely based on assuming that humans are naturally inclined to cooperate with one another. Theyre just never going to if u call them out for being the hypocrites that almost all of us naturally are. My 2 cents, anyway.
Thanks for ur time, but more so for ur energy irl with what u do. Continue yelling at everyone else in here, ur energy is wholesome.
Thank you for this. People are using short term fear to try to trump the long term fear and it's such a backwards perspective. It's like someone who is afraid of the kitchen being a mess while you're trying to stop the leak in the roof. And the moment we try to explain this to people they act as if we're signing their death warrants not realizing they're signing their own.
america's been fucking its education system in the ass (unconsentingly) since 1980, and now you're a country of redneck morons, exactly per the plan you made. Good job!
He did put effort into fighting it, Jeb blocked the recount after it was found Gore had negative votes and Bush had more votes than people in a county then when it got to the Supreme Court they ruled that it took too long to get to them for them to allow a recount
Nope it's your job to vote for dems for no reason other than "not republican" and if you don't vote for dems for no reason other than "not republican" you're a bigger enemy to dems than republicans.
Another thing that might have been different with a Gore win: when Bill Clinton left office, the federal government did not have a balanced budget - it had an actual budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. With a continuation of that type of fiscal "conservatism", we could today have been debt-free as a nation. Instead, we have a debt of $34 fucking trillion.
You realise that debt of the government is equal to wealth in the private sector? Being debt-free would mean that there is no central bank money in circulation. How would this help the actual economy?
I would love to see what the actual contribution is for each party that controlled Congress/Presidency. While I'm sure there is spending that gets bipartisan support, I think the majority of the deficit in the last 20+ years has come from either wars initiated by Republicans and/or tax cuts (also initiated by Republicans).
All the spikes are from economic bailouts, well supported by both parties. That's clearly indicated in 2008 as both bush and Obama supported the bailouts.
Oh c’mon it’s not like they passed a law making it okay to profiteer off of war so they could gouge the taxpayers for - checks earpeice ohhh. That’s right, they did.
The resolution to illegally attack Iraq purposefully left out the war profiteering.
Still though. Both sides bad, let’s all listen to the FSB and not vote.
History isn't inevitable, but nothing has fundementally changed about how Liberals and Democrats view strategy and politics; this should cause to to strongly consider the value or wisdom of statements like Blue No Matter Who, if even when victorious, they refuse to take it.
Its not a long shot. It actually is the timeline we should be on and Gore was *impeccably clear about climate change being his priority. He won, by both the electoral college final count and the popular vote. The election was stolen from the American people but is relegated to a modern folk tale, in-spite of it actually being reality.
Gore absolutely did not make climate change his priority in 2000. That's just a straight up lie. He campaigned almost entirely on the economy and reforming social security and Medicare. Climate change was NOT a top issue for voters or for Gore in 2000.
Oh no, we might have gotten social security and Medicare funding fixed, so people today wouldn’t be looking at poverty in their old age? What would gen z be if they were allowed hope and dreams?
And imagine a presidential candidate willing to fix intractable long term problems, who was later found to be very serious about climate change?
There would still be a problem because while the USA have a big responsibility in the fight against climate change, they are far from the only country that needs to do something about it. It's an us problem, not just a U.S. problem.
As the world's financial powerhouse, the United States has both an outsized effect on climate change relative to our population, but also power to do something about it that extends far beyond our borders. Both treaties and commercial agreements can be used to lever other nations into responsible climate policies; we've been doing this with just about everything else for our entire existence. You ever wonder why weed is illegal everywhere in the world at about the same time? Or copyright laws that destroy the public domain? We did that. We could use that power for good, as well.
It seems like most other developed countries have been taking it more seriously. We could have been part of that group
In developing world, think of all the energy projects since then, that could have leapfrogged the technology directly to renewables. Heck, the extra decade or two of “free” energy could well have altered their economies
The thing is this is China too. I do buy their point that in many ways they have still been a developing country, they still have had so much population to bring forward, so much progress to make, while also being the worlds manufacturer. And when they’re in, they’re all in. Yeah they’ve continued to build coal, and maybe the US being serious about climate change could have influenced that for the last few decades, but everyone needs to remember that while they continued to build coal, they also were taking the worlds biggest steps in Renewables. This could have happened earlier.
This is an extreme exaggeration. Supposing you could wave a magic wand and zero out all US emissions and waste beginning in the year 2000, we'd still be just as fucked due to China and India's emissions. And guess what, neither of those nations give a fuck about sticking to climate treaties. China manipulates its stats on virtually every useful metric, and India has a position that they deserve to finish industrializing.
Al Gore was a new runner for president after serving vice president for the two immediately previous terms, and was 52 at time of running.
Biden is an incumbent who served two vice president terms which he finished 8 years ago, and he is currently 81.
Now tbf, the orange definitely made Bush look like a competent and coherent president in comparison. But comparing Al Gore to Biden is kinda dumb. I expect Biden's huge train plan to go about as well as Obama's huge train plan of which he was also a part of.
It's not that both sides are the same, it's that they're both corporately backed which means nothing substantial will actually be achieved besides not shooting yourself in the foot like what Republicans like to do.
Also keep in mind the 2000 election was stolen by the supreme court because that power is totally valid against actual votes.
I am someone who knows how you all act and am completely fed up with it.
You need to fucking grow up before it's too late.
I am going to just leave the U.S. when the shit hits the fan. You are the only ones who are going to suffer. And even if I do, it won't matter, because you brought this upon yourselves.
This is bullshit. Climate change wasn't a thing for Gore until he went looking for another job. If he had been president everything would still be the same....militaristic and corporate. And remember that he is a Southern conservative whose wife wanted music banned but had to settle for warning stickers.
You Enlightened Centrists sure do love selective glorification of the past
Almost like a war broke out that cut America's allies off from their usual stocks of oil and raising prices globally including on non-oil-product goods or something!
That is not at all what they said and you should be fucking embarrassed. They were saying that electing gore in 2000 wouldn't have (necessarily) prevented Putin from invading Ukraine. But I think you probably understand that. You're just being a piece of shit.
Its like watching a train speeding towards a barrier, steadily accelerating faster and faster, full throttle, and saying well it takes time to come to a full stop. No brakes applied, no taking the foot off the gas. Im not even accusing him of doing nothing, he's actively worsening climate change.
Except the foot is being taken off the gas, or in the analogy coal is beyond fed in slower, or some coal is beyond replaced with renewables, but you're amazed the train is still going. Like Geez industrial and power momentum is freaking hard to change, we're not going to turn off all the fossil power plants, ice cars, and change every industrial process in a measly 3 years.
You're blinded by the D next to his name, never in the history of the world have we been worsening climate change faster.
Taking foot off the gas is emissions peaking, remaining steady, not being higher than the previous year. Hitting the brakes is reducing emissions to less than the previous year. We have to do that for a long time before we stop contributing to climate change, as it's all cumulative.
I think you, like many, expect the entire freaking world to change in a couple of years. You have no idea how much there is to do and how much industry there is out there. You have to keep voting it in for decades. It's not one and done. Sorry but you have no idea how the world works. But go ahead and don't vote in stupid protest and we can start again from scratch in 8-16 years (remember it's been 23 years since we could have started with Gore, but go ahead and don't vote.)
And BTW I didn't say hitting the brakes, I said less coal being put in. Momentum is a bitch. That's what the world is. Buut you don't seem to realize that and just want to complain. Chow.
PS you're the one actually blinded by a D next to the name because you expect everything to change because of that D in 2 freaking years (when he had control of the house).
And this is the reason it’s a crisis. Climate change is a long process, as is changing the entire world economy to face it. It’s not a crisis because of disruptive weather this year, but because we’ve already set in motion changes to the atmosphere that will inexorably make much more serious changes for at least the next century. Even changing just one small sector of emissions, changing internal combustion to battery electric vehicles, will take a couple decades, and is facing constant resistance by conservatives. One small sector. We have to change the entire world economy. There is so much work ahead and we’re already out of time to prevent serious climat consequences. Starting a couple decades earlier would have made a huge difference (although EV technology wasn’t up to it, so we’d focus on other things).
People can’t seem to look at a graph and internalize what it means when the line keeps going steeply up into the future, but Al Gore clearly could. People can’t seem to conceptualize that some actions have long term results, but Al Gore clearly could
Agreed. On batteries this is where I go back to the 70s. When the oil embargo happened they should have been R&Ding hard for better batteries (and solar and nuclear and fusion). If they started some serious battery R&D back then we would be incredibly better off.
And we should have gone off coal in the 80s. AFAIK there was enough NG to replace it, at least in North America.
And then Obama won and he fixed the climate crisis and didn't start any wars. Good thing we finally learned to vote for Democrat! Both sides schmoth sides!
And Genocide Joe of course is fixing every single issue right now. Such as killing all Palestinians which is the most important issue as all the Democrats focus goes to keeping israel's Genocide going.
Assuming that anything would have been fixed if people voted for the Democrat guy in one single election is utterly delusional. Imperialism has been a thing under Democrats as much as under Republicans
And being aware of a problem and flatly denying that it exists are also two very different things. OPs greater point holds; 'both sides' arguments are fallacies.
So are you assuming OP has no idea what the average age of Lemmy users are? Or the average age of people who think Joe Biden is a strike blocking, genocide supporting piece of shit?
I agree that GB did an insane amount of damage to our country and Trump is the same way. But for all the damage that has been done, it doesn't feel like democrats have been able to achieve a comparable amount of good. I understand the mechanics on "why" they are unable to (a big tent coalition up against a unified party of fanatics) but it's for that reason that I might agree that Al Gore, despite his best intentions, may have been railroaded in his efforts to establish the US as a climate leader.
I feel like the undertone of this question is "clearly you don't know what the Dems have done, otherwise you'd feel differently." Maybe I'm way off base with that, but there isn't any legislation that Dems have passed during Biden's term that even comes close to undoing or reversing the damage of the Trump presidency. Feel free to argue your case, but I would put special emphasis on these points:
The repeal of Roe v Wade
The appointment of 3 conservative justices (which additionally led to the repeal of affirmative action)
An insurrection that has not resulted in any major convictions against Trump, his family, or his lieutenants
The death of a million+ Americans from a deadly pandemic that was politicized because of one man's massive ego/possible Russian ties
Massive inflation caused by huge bailouts and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, followed by shrink and greedflation. American corporations haven't shared any amount of the burden they caused. The Dems did pass a 15% minimum corporate* tax rate, but this is band aid on a much larger problem, because this tax rate will just be repealed in time. These companies need real punitive action/jail/anti-trust laws being used against them.
I'm sure I missed a couple, but it is asinine to think that anything Joe Biden has accomplished has "fixed," or even started to fix, any of these things.
Did anyone claim Joe's cabinet fixed all the ills of the last administration? The fundamental comment being thrown around by the likes of /u/nicolairathjen and their other equivocating pals is that the current administration has been ineffective at actualizing any good despite having a really long list of achieved results. There is this fatalist attitude floating around, but every time you ask people how much they know about what is actually going on on a policy level it's crickets. Your 5 point bullet list is evidence alone at what an impact a cabinet can have so what are we even arguing any more?
Forget the world, do you not think US has had an outsized affect on the environment and climate change specifically?
But yes, having lived through that, so many times other countries had no need to take the environment seriously because the US didn’t. Sometimes there was influence. Sometimes it was merely the biggest polluter
It absolutely, 100% no-doubt, are-you-even-joking would have been better. But my idiot friends all voted Nader to register their displeasure. Stupid fucks.
I disagree. There’s only so much one man would have been able to do. After 9/11, he would have lost all buy-in from the public as the War on Terror started. Who would care about saving the planet if they are worried about terrorist attacks?
The Kyoto Protocol would have been ratified. Could you imagine if we had an international agreement with legally-binding emissions reductions in place in 2000? The Paris Agreement is the best we have, and it’s simply not as strong as Kyoto would have been
We can do two things at the same time you know. And the way industry and electrical grid changes work is over a long period of time. You move the needle at the start and the path change is dramatic.
No Iraq War, "No Child Left Behind" never becomes a thing, Bin Laden gets caught in Afghanistan if the 9/11 plot even manages to happen since Bush is known to have ignored a report containing a warning about the attacks being planned.
You really wanna tell me that a world without the war on terror would be exactly as bad as the one we live in today? Especially one without the war on terror where the century kicks off with a president who takes the climate crisis seriously?
You’re taking quite a bit of a leap there about 9/11 being foiled because Gore was in office. I really don’t think that it would have been sunshine and lollipops like what has been suggested. He’s one man. I have a hard time believing one man would have made the difference in terms of 9/11.
I was 17 during that election, otherwise I would have voted for him. I think he could have done some great things, but I’m not so sure those great things would have made massive waves that would change today.
Bush ignored an attack imminent report that basically spelled out the intent of Al Qaeda to launch an attack via the hijacking of airplanes. Gore likely would not have, as gore is not as dumb as Bush is well known to be.
It is befuddling reading the sentiment for the majority of the comments on this post.
Having a chief executive in office in 2000 who was super concerned about climate change would have made a big difference.
But hey that's just like my opinion man
Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say "Yeah but Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same" really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.
It would literally have changed the world. At this point we're scrabbling around from the outside desperately trying to get the leaders to care, when it's already too late for a lot of the semi-good outcomes. We missed a chance to have a guy in charge who understood the science, and cared a lot about it, back when there was some time to change the trajectory.
Edit: Now a bunch of different users have independently come to the conclusion that it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because the Republicans would have defeated anything he did in congress, and now they all want to share that message with all of us, as their current explanation for why it is that elections don't matter anyway.
(Edit 2: Guys. You get to vote for congress in elections, too.)
IDK, maybe I am reading too much into it and it really is a bunch of people who are motivated to post about politics, but whose brains are also just wired to search for defeatism wherever they can find it, and that's the message they want to share. Maybe.
Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it's true, saying "x is useless" is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
Foresight is often mistaken for cycicism by those that lack it.
Who said cynical opinions are always factually incorrect? You're making up an argument.
Thank you for illustrating my point brilliantly; you have contributed nothing of worth, but your feeling of superiority.
It's just a simple piece of advice, no need to get spikey.
I get the same message that people think capitalism under Biden is the same as capitalism under Trump. It's honestly bizarre.
As someone who's guilty of thinking 'both sides are the same' I think you're definitely right.
For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.
Australia has ranked choice voting, does it not? I'd vote for the farthest left option too if the US had RCV.
I'm voting every single far left party before I even hit labour. If you have ranked choice voting may as well use it.
Yeah, that's why I don't understand people voting labor here.
It works pretty well, too. Sure there's still a two party situation going on, but recently the amount of votes not going to either is making it clear they're slowly losing voter confidence as the older generation fade out.
I think younger voters actually understand how important the senate is too and how powerful ranking it with some detail can be.
Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.
Yeah, but we did get the War on Terror, so... That was fun /s
Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn't do already. You're massively overrating the impact one president has. It's not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn't pull that schtick until after he lost the election.
There's no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I'm actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.
Especially considering it's a GLOBAL phenomenon lol.
Here’s something that just came up in another thread, that shows Al Gore’s climate bona fides
Progress is cumulative, and it happens slowly.
Even if he didn't accomplish anything other than preventing the regression that happened under Bush, it would have allowed Obama and Biden to make more progress than they did.
If he did manage to accomplish anything, no matter how small, then Obama and Biden could have made even more progress.
Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they'd probably have impeached Gore for it.
Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.
The EPA is part of the executive branch. They could have regulated carbon emissions like they regulate other emissions.
They could have done that under Obama or Biden too then. So why haven't they?
There were things like this
And it di pd go forward, until repealed by Trump
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that? Do you think industry won’t tie the change up in the courts for decades?
Yes, the executive can attempt these things but with two coequal branches, one of which swings between the parties pretty regularly every couple years, it wouldn’t stick.
Trick question! It's not up to the legislative branch to decide the limits of Executive authority. That's up to the supreme Court. Speaking of which, president Gore would have gotten TWO SEATS appointed.
My first thought. Oh no! The oil industry had to double its lobbying budget while still making record profits.
Gore won, but lost to a judicial coup.
One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.
Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.
And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
as a non american, I learned that from how I met your mother
Supposedly he lost because he asked for recounts only in counties where he was polling well, but then they should have ordered a general recount.
He shouldn’t have to ask for recounts when the initial counts are suspect. Was never a real democracy to begin with.
Everyone makes mistakes, even election officials who are trying their best. It's good that it's possible to ask for a recount
SYSK just did an episode
[Stuff You Should Know] The 2000 Presidential Election: A Real Cluster https://podcastaddict.com/stuff-you-should-know/episode/169274063
I'd also like to complain about the electoral college again. Anything but going by popular vote is anti-democratic. The American system is so damn infuriating to me and it's not even my country. But it affects us globally.
In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women's reproductive rights, and now in 24 they're angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can't see.
If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn't really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
If only being told that were enough to finally get the idjits to pull their heads out of their asses.
Honestly, at least on Lemmy, I think a lot of the ass-headers are just a mixture of shills and edgelords. In what proportion, I have no idea.
The ratio of beliefs on the issue is very different among the people who are genuinely engaged with it, than among the people who quick post a punchy message or two and then scuttle away. There's just a lot of people coming in for a moment to do the second activity; that's the only thing that makes it seem like the opinion poll is as mixed as it looks like at first.
(I've been spending way too much time paying attention to this today.)
Lemmy is such a small market compared to others like reddit, twitter, and facebook. Two of them have gone full fox news. Reddit wants to but can't afford to lose any users. The battle for social media is over and the fact that disrupters even make their way to lemmy shows how far their reach is.
Russia and other bad actors are dragging the USA off its throne and their doing it from the inside. The GOP are like fully hopped up junkies at this point and if we tried to remove the mainline of the propaganda feeding their dilusion they'd just as well claw your eyes out.
Just sucks no one in our government is willing to do anything about it.
Edit: If I had one guess it would be that lemmy exists to push a red scare caricature version of a communism that's why you see all these communists with awful takes all the time. Some of them radicalized but mostly just bad actors trying to portray lemmy, one of the last hide outs for lefties, as radical communists.
Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.
The dems are definitely consistently better for the economy though.
Centrist Democrats will always blame progressive discontent for their losses, even if their losses are caused by the Supreme Court undermining democracy itself.
Quit moving to the right, and we'll quit pointing it out.
Yeah so what about Gore and climate crisis? We got a sweet ass pointless Iraq war with Bush. We got to do the most American thing ever, bully a small country for natural resources and stage a regime change. Would have Gore given us that? Pft no. We would have a serious conversation about climate and taken some steps to mitigate everything.
Humans are some of the worst polluters, so killing all those Middle Easterners saved thousands of tons of CO2 emissions! /s
I've read that Ghengis Khan, while he was responsible for the killing of 20–40 million people, that actually resulted in the lowering of global CO2 levels and led to reforestation in many parts of the world. So maybe a little genocide every now and then helps... (I'm not seriously suggesting this)
A calm and rational discussion and response to 9/11 instead of making up lies, going on the war path, and telling allies that they're either with us or against us? Lame. Pass. (/s)
I honestly don't think Gore could kept the country out of Afghanistan. The public wanted justice for 9/11, by justice they wanted blood. The public would have forced Gore to do something about 9/11.
It would have been very easy for Gore to get sucked into Afghanistan even after trying to put forth rational explanations of why we shouldn't have occupied the country. The end result of would have been somewhat similar, 20 years of war, and nothing really accomplished.
The Iraq war on the other hand would have never happened on Gore.
There would also not have been an invasion of Iraq, things like Isis would have probably remained an unkicked hornet's nest.
License to torture at will would not have been granted to government goons.
The threat of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into iconic buildings would have been taken seriously. Which opens up the possibility that 9/11 could have been averted. Then maybe the mouth-breathers at TSA would not have been given the power to profile and harass at airports.
The list goes on: Katrina and New Orleans; the neutralizing of the Consumer Protection Bureau; the typically republican financial free-for-all that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Then there are Supreme Court appointments, which we get to keep for life, like goddamned herpes.
But since so many ignorant and smug lazy assholes stayed home on Election Day bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe, everybody got a succession of utterly preventable shit sandwiches.
I keep comparing Casablanca to New York City. One reason is that they're both the biggest cities in their respective country without being the capital, and that they suck, but also because before 2001, they both had twin towers (the ones in Casablanca are still standing btw).
We can also imagine a reality where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were collectively not elected and global neoliberalism failed to crystallize.
But this is just day dreaming. The reality is those things didn't happen and here we are.
Bush appointed Roberts and Alito.
I wonder if Citizens United would have come about to cause such damage had Gore been able to appoint two different justices.
I know that's not climate related, but it's a pretty big deal result of the 2000 election shenanigans.
Citizens United and Voting Rights Act both. Even with Trump's nominees we would currently have a 5-4 Liberal court.
We would still have Roe Vs. Wade.
Liberals would have "played it fair" and been all "across the isle" and appointed on "conservative" (reactionary corporatist) judge together with the corporatist judge they appoint.
Democrats could add more supreme court judges and run with that but they don't want to. They can not just run on "not trump" and win.
Fyi I think it's aisle.
Yet another fuck up by the Boomers. Interesting how it always come back to them being a piece of shit generation.
I was so disappointed as a Canadian to see Gore lose. That stolen election was stolen from all of us not just America.
Imagine how different the entire world would be now if Bush/Chaney had never happened.
Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it's not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.
I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.
Oh for sure, he was following Clinton's lead, so that's why it's somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn't the case, or it at least isn't how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yes, I agree. I'm also not sure that running as a super environmental progressive would have been possible at the time. We were just coming out of the timber wars, where the timber industry had spent millions convincing the US that a few hippies chained to trees trying to prevent the last bits of old-growth redwoods from destruction were the problem.
It was a different time and we were very desensitized to the concept of hippy punching etc.
How high do you have to be to erase everything al gore did to prove he wanted to do something about climate change? Why are you rewriting history like this? It's preposterous
You're the one rewriting history. Al Gore didn't run on climate change. Ordinary voters don't give a single shit about climate change in 2000. There was never any chance Gore was going to spend his political capital on climate change legislation.
The most we would have gotten from him is more incrementslism on the topic, like we got from Obama and Biden. The op is utterly delusional for posting such garbage.
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process... or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn't he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a "modern" politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden's "then you ain't black" comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore's actual statement (which, of course, was not that he "invented the internet") was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he'd accomplished and the value of it. It's the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider "the curve").
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you're not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians' words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.
I think Obama's approach was to bypass the media, and reach out directly to the people themselves, even if through them. That way, the media dared not make fun of him. Ofc they did anyway, but quite often, it did not stick as a result.
Here I have to ignore Faux News b/c they just ruthlessly tried to tear him apart - e.g. a black kid dies by violence, and Obama sheds a tear in sympathy, and they accuse him of it being faked. Which even if so, so what? We should have, and demonstrate, sympathy to people - imagine if that were a competition, and he was winning it, rather than the exact opposite of that which is the reality that we had:-(.
So the more mainstream media made fun of Obama's pauses, and how white his hair had turned while in office. Obama himself played along, especially in the White House Correspondents speeches. Those were great relations:-D.
Somehow Gore never managed to do that. I imagine him more like an engineer (which I am myself), who might be technically quite proficient, but struggle at the more "people" aspects of the job. Nixon too in a fashion. The people want a JFK/Bill Clinton/Obama/Trump, they don't want someone who will actually get the job done, more's the pity:-(.
And now we have Biden, who similarly is quietly getting things done, though the media is eating him alive whenever/however they can. After that, whether in this upcoming election or the one after that, it'll be a GQP member - you just know that, b/c of Dems never winning successive elections in history. Rinse & Repeat.
UNLESS libs learn this lesson, finally, and put forward someone who is electable? It very much IS a popularity contest, no matter how much we may wish, demand, expect, or hope otherwise:-|.
The attitude of the Greek Stoics impresses me: we cannot impose our views upon the entire world, we can only change what WE can manage to change ourselves. Maybe that means skirting the government at the federal level - like individual states right now could pass protections against future anti-abortion laws, so why don't they? Or coalitions among cities could accomplish a lot - e.g. we can't force people to take vaccines, but we can work to make them cheap, effective, and available to anyone that will.
Navel-gazing back into the past does serve a purpose, but only to the extent that we learn from our mistakes as we move forward.
You're not going to succeed, nor will you ever care about anything that matters
He never said he invented the Internet. You saying that kinda shows how much you know.
No, he didn't say he invented the Internet. What he did say was that as a young congressman he took the initiative to create the Internet, by providing the funding to expand the military's Arpanet for civilian usage - a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make since that is actually what he did. Literally months after Gore made this perfectly true and unremarkable statement, Bush advisor Karl Rove twisted it into "I invented the Internet". There is no "supposedly" about this.
Gore simply talked about one of his biggest accomplishments (perhaps the biggest accomplishment) of his long career as a politician. It is not reasonable to expect a Democrat to never mention the best parts of his record out of fear that the Republicans will twist his words - that will happen regardless.
The problem is he didn’t. Go back and look. Republican Party twisted his words and successfully made the twisted version into the popular narrative. That’s also a time tested political trick, but when it’s not what you actually said, you have no control over it.
The only thing that would have worked then was out-blustering his opponents, turn something else into the meme of the day..it’s a very powerful trick for getting elected, but really not one we should reward in a national leader
At the time you didn't have to be major disruptor like we need major disruption now. What you needed to do was move the needle, which could be done. Moving the needle early on drastically changes the path decades later.
There's also what you say during the election and what you do. I'm pretty sure Bush played it up (I'm amazed at what I see him say in old videos). Gore played down what he intended to do, or didn't make a big deal about it, because that's not what got votes at the time. So they may sound similar but not actually be similar.
Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could've been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn't have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might've had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.
Tell that to SCOTUS. The people voting or debating each other didn't decide 2000.
Gore received 540+k more individual votes than Bush did, but he lost in the electoral vote.
People's votes are not weighed equally for the presidency, so that 'more' has a lot of work to do, unfortunately. Given the electoral college system for presidential elections that sentiment has to be qualified with "in the right places/districts".
Which is exemplary of the case that led to Bush v Gore deciding the election.
Climate Commitment. We’ve been screwed since the ‘90’s. Gore may have mitigated the warming, but a certain amount of warming would have occurred regardless, and will continue even if we achieve net-zero emissions. There is an amount of latent heat already trapped in the atmosphere. The warming we are experiencing now is from the early 2000’s.
I know. I suck. But the science is clear. We done screwed up. Much love to all.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they'll be able to actually do anything about it. The US government, and all governments to a greater or lesser extent, fundamentally serve capital and are beholden to the interests of capitalists.
No president, no matter how far to the left, could possibly save us. They will always delay action as long as possible, when not actively accelerating climate change. We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Voting does help, because a hostile government will systematically murder people who resist climate change while a "friendly" one will only imprison some of them. Voting is helpful, but not sufficient. We don't have any more time to waste begging for our lives.
Edit: also, he did win and then there was a coup. This was at least the third right wing coup in the last 60 years. So... Yeah...
Brett Kavanaugh helped with that coup and now sits on the supreme court.
And? Whet exactly is the point of this post? You might not get EVERYTHING you want, but you'll get SOMETHING, VS voting for assholes who'll actually be working AGAINST fixing the problem.
From civil rights, to healthcare, to climate, to pretty much any issue that matters Republicans will ONLY make it worse.
In my decades of living I have not seen Republicans offer a solution to a single issue. It's always just fear mongering and hate.
Tell us "something" we got. Everything continues to get worse under Biden. Just more slowly.
Until Trump the whole country had been getting steadily more progressive. We went from a Democrat signing an order to kick gays out of the military to legal gay marriage nationwide in just 20 years.
We were slowly getting better, and the GOP was fuming over it. When Obama won in 2008 despite the GOP putting up their most centrist, electable candidate in generations, they abandoned Democracy entirely and started burning everything down.
Occupy was under Obama. DAPL was under Obama. Prism was under Obama.
Obama did some good things, but he presided over the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in history. That was him. He facilitated the police crackdown on occupy. He facilitated the police attack on the Standing Rock tribe to push through the pipeline that ultimately poisoned their water. The NSA was caught actively spying on American citizens under Obama.
Republicans have been burning everything down since the 70's. That's not a new thing. Nixon carried out a coup and started the drug war specifically as a cover for political violence against his opponents, and people in his cabinet have literally admitted as much. Every fire Republicans have started, Democrats have tended.
Obama was probably the best president the US could elect, and the best he could do was pave the way for Trump. The problem is America. Republicans have been fascists for a long time, but Democrats have been paving their way and enabling them the whole time. The system is broken beyond repair. The best you can do with voting is delay the collapse. You have to organize outside of the system if you want to survive.
Since before Clinton housing, education and healthcare has gotten more expensive while wages have stagnated. The wealth gap has been expanding for years.
I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact the republicans are doing everything they fucking can to hurt democracy and Biden so they can say we told you so.... THE problem is the republicans that refuse to do their fucking job and represent the people of this country. Cancun cruz? That fucking zombie from Kentucky??? The dipshit in florida??? Gym fucking Jordan????? It's embarrassing.
Biden has no excuse for calling to block the rail strike and continuing to supply Israel with weapons.
Sounds like someone watches too much fox "news"....
Yeah all those Fox News watchers known for their lack of support for Israel. /s
Do you even know what you're talking about?
That's basically what I said. The important thing here, that most liberals fail to understand, is that there will be no government solution. Ever. No matter who you vote for.
You have to actually organize and take direct action, not just beg for some authority to do something. Liberals tend to miss this. They just invest energy in getting people to vote, then they go to brunch. If you only focus on voting, you're not actively moving towards survival you're just delaying death. That's my point.
Having someone who doesn’t understand (or, more likely does but doesn’t give a shit) IS a guarantee that nothing is done about it.
Great, but I literally said voting helps. Pointing to where I start saying "voting is not sufficient" and repeating something I said later doesn't add anything.
Can you explain to me why you felt this was necessary to say?
Great! Lemme just let the trans folks in my life know that alls we gotta do is elect the fuck who threatens to erase their existence entirely!
Bc the untenable systems at play in Russia, S Arabia, DPRK, RSA, etc. have done wonders towards the citizenry in those countries rising up and rebelling... oh... wait... thats right... its damn near impossible to rise up the closer your state is to the fascist mark. Congrats, ur right that the liberal system blows. Replacing it with something worse will only make things worse.
How successful have you been at bringing ur fellow comrades together to organize for direct action? And thats going to go better after we go full fascist?! After our minority allies are straight up outlawed?
You have the same level of comprehension for nuance as maga cultists. We are on the brink of fascism because liberals are useless.
But me? Oh, I organized an antifascist groups that organized one of the largest antifascist protests in the US the day after the murder of Heather Heyer, helped organize an antifascist self defence training group, I organized a police oversight group that de-anonomized thousands of complaints about police allowing for the identification of highly problematic officers, one of whom was fired after our efforts. I helped get the data for SPD.watch. I organized several public records request trainings. I started a food security committee that helped a bunch of people get food when they didn't have money, which expanded to canning food for houseless folks and supporting camps. oh, I also organized the protest where I was shot by a fascist. That and about a hundred other things, all of which I did with my trans comrades who were organizing for their own survival because they knew that liberals would not ultimately protect them.
What the fuck have you done?
Edit: your vote against murdering the trans folks is great, but you know what would help the people in your life when the voting eventually fails to stop fascism? Why don't you talk to them about what hormones they need and work on figuring out a plan to smuggle it in. As a cis person, you're the right person to risk yourself for them. Even today you could work with them to organize a safety group that they could call for support if they don't feel safe walking home or end up in an unexpected sketchy situation. You could organize a hate watch group to track fascist activities. You could do a ton of shit RIGHT FUCKING NOW instead of waiting to vote and then just seeing what happens.
Oh boy, let me try and reply here without losing my cool. If youre actually putting in effort into direct action, u deserve a serious reply. I have infinite respect for that, please keep that in mind as you read this.
You accuse me of a lack of nuance, while implying that i am against direct action and only favor voting, all in the efforts of getting upset at someone because they encourage others to vote and still ignoring the crux of their point. But its easier to compare me to maga. That way, the onlookers now know to side with u, after all u just egoized about all these wonderful things that i never told u not to do! This is hardly fostering comraderie between the working class. Please check my (admittedly short) comment history. I am in favor of always more direct action, but i am always against disparaging ppl ffom voting.
You say things like smuggle hormones, great. I am in favor, but guess what? That very word implies u are taking something from somewhere where it is legal, to somewhere where it is not. You are still beholden to the laws of wherever it is you are smuggling from. I.e. you need hormones to not be outlawed everywhere.
Im not trying to tell you your actions are useless. Far from it. Clearly u do more than most, certainly more than me, and i concede that. Your actions would only be more meaningful if done by more people. What i keep trying to hammer thru to all you other leftists pn here isnt to stop, but to simply understand that these efforts are NOT more easily undertaken in a system that is "untenable."
You didnt address that point for a reason. You complain about how awful libs are. Who? My shitty coworkers? The ones who believe in this system bc thats all they know and are exploited and taken advantage of and made to think their neighbors are the problem? 50+ yrs of very concerted propaganda have gotten them to this point. Hate em all you want, when u talk about the things that need to happen to topple the system, thats who you are depending on awakening. These same brainwashed folk who want nothing more than to end the day knowing their families are still provided for.
And again, look at the countries that do tend towards fascism harder than the States. Do you see more enlightened proles? More direct action? Because reality tends to disagree. Youre sitting here shitting on another leftist bc god forbid he votes, ur shitting on the liberals who perpetuate the shitty system we're forced into, but youre espousing values that all predicate on working together. Do you not see the dissonance there? We are NOWHERE near revolution, further still from utopia. We can cry that the climate is killing us, or that the system is too slow. Great. But right now, that system is only out to exploit you, not make your existence unliveable. If we get to that point, which under trump, it is likely, no amount of direct action is going to help. Not in a time when all the powers that be need do is take a look at their preferred mass surveillance system to find the rabble rousers and send out a drone or two to quell whichever protest gets to crazy.
Tldr: Thanks for your efforts, please dont disparage voting.
I literally said "Voting helps," and talked specifically about how it helps. At no point did I ever say not to vote. I even kind of said that I think people should vote. Why the do you think I'm telling people not to vote? Take a look at my post and ask yourself where this is coming from and maybe you'll understand why I'm calling you out.
I'm not saying anywhere, at any point, that people shouldn't vote. I'm not saying anyone is bad for voting. I'm not even hinting at the idea the voting is not at least a little helpful. I'm just fucking sick of everyone focusing on voting when it's one of the lowest valuable type of action you can take after canvasing and posting shitty memes.
I organized, I got shot, I kept organizing. The whole time I watched liberals tell queer and trans folks, black and brown folks, and all kinds of other marginalized folks and every intersection of those to vote harder any time they'd call out liberals. Liberals got Biden, stabbed radicals in the back, and went back to brunch. They had fucking years to organize, and instead they just got disappointed again and again by the failure of the system they believe in to address existential threats against it. Whenever they get called out for this shitty behavior, or whenever anyone points out that voting isn't enough, they hold up those same marginalized people they've been throwing under the bus between election years.
When I'm saying "make the system untenable" I'm meaning that you have to make oppression impossible by organizing. You have to make ecocide impossible by making it so expensive to extract petroleum that it stops being an option.
You think that you have to be close to revolution to make the system untenable? It took one person attacking an immigration facility to stop Trump's ethnic cleansing plan. Slavery didn't end because people voted against it. It ended because people formed a guerilla resistence that attacked plantations and smuggled people out, illegally. The civil war started because John Brown lead an armed assault on Harpers Ferry with the intent of creating an armed slave insurrection. They, and a lot of other people carrying out direct action, made the system untenable.
You know how they got to the point of making the system untenable? They organized. You should absolutely vote if your conscience lets you. I will shame you for not voting if you're as privileged as I am, but I won't if you're not. But for fuck sake, organize. Organize small groups. Organize too many groups to infiltrate. Go fill jails like XR until they can't afford to put people in jail anymore. Make this shit expensive. Organize locally to abolish free parking.Make perpetuating climate change so expensive that every oil company is forced to invest in renewables. That's what making the system untenable means. The fact that you jumped immediately to assuming I could only have meant something like "don't vote," even though I explicitly said voting has value, says something. Please take a minute to reflect on why you've spent this much time and effort arguing against something I did not say.
Very fair points, theres been a lot of ppl on this site yelling at me in a short period of time. I got a little fixated on making the system untenable bc in this very same thread theres no shortage of shitheads arguing against voting, all while countless other russian shills all across the web eg them on in hopes of enabling russian imperial interests.
Im just very frustrated, as i can tell u are. Im looking for leftists to come together regardless of how far left they swing. Ur points on making the system on tenable sound more like the types of direct action i seem to most believe in. Its about making life untenable for the capitalist owner class, not the poors foghting for their lives down below.
On that point tho, i still would urge you to find room for some more sympathy/empathy for those, erm- lets say, highly misguided poors still simping for the neoliberal way. With the amount of propaganda they consume, its no wonder they are the way they are, but that doesnt mean that theyre entirely lost. Ppl are fickle and change their minds drastically all the time, especially when their ego is in play. Ive gotten far right wingers to agree with me on dismantling insurance agencies, enacting a maximum wage, shit even to abolish currency altogether and trans rights. Its about how its presented to them, and by whom. Im not going to tell u to waste ur time convincing them actively, that is a waste of time.
But a newly found culture based on sympathy and kindness isnt necessarily all that far away. Anarchist theory is largely based on assuming that humans are naturally inclined to cooperate with one another. Theyre just never going to if u call them out for being the hypocrites that almost all of us naturally are. My 2 cents, anyway.
Thanks for ur time, but more so for ur energy irl with what u do. Continue yelling at everyone else in here, ur energy is wholesome.
Thank you for this. People are using short term fear to try to trump the long term fear and it's such a backwards perspective. It's like someone who is afraid of the kitchen being a mess while you're trying to stop the leak in the roof. And the moment we try to explain this to people they act as if we're signing their death warrants not realizing they're signing their own.
america's been fucking its education system in the ass (unconsentingly) since 1980, and now you're a country of redneck morons, exactly per the plan you made. Good job!
He did put effort into fighting it, Jeb blocked the recount after it was found Gore had negative votes and Bush had more votes than people in a county then when it got to the Supreme Court they ruled that it took too long to get to them for them to allow a recount
Nope it's your job to vote for dems for no reason other than "not republican" and if you don't vote for dems for no reason other than "not republican" you're a bigger enemy to dems than republicans.
"choices" when the Supreme Court stepped in and decided a winner
Another thing that might have been different with a Gore win: when Bill Clinton left office, the federal government did not have a balanced budget - it had an actual budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. With a continuation of that type of fiscal "conservatism", we could today have been debt-free as a nation. Instead, we have a debt of $34 fucking trillion.
You realise that debt of the government is equal to wealth in the private sector? Being debt-free would mean that there is no central bank money in circulation. How would this help the actual economy?
That's not how it works at all.
Ok, then explain how it works. Where does money in circulation come from?
Should be very clear that both parties are very equal in the growth of the debt.
No they're not. Deficits like this are from not taxing the rich and corporations. Trump alone is like 40% of the deficit because of this.
I would love to see what the actual contribution is for each party that controlled Congress/Presidency. While I'm sure there is spending that gets bipartisan support, I think the majority of the deficit in the last 20+ years has come from either wars initiated by Republicans and/or tax cuts (also initiated by Republicans).
It's not that detailed, but you get the picture.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/29/tweets/republican-presidents-democrats-contribute-deficit/
All the spikes are from economic bailouts, well supported by both parties. That's clearly indicated in 2008 as both bush and Obama supported the bailouts.
However tax policy certainly differs.
Mmm yes but Gore winning wouldn't provide Cheney with lots of lucrative no-bid Halliburton contracts.
Oh c’mon it’s not like they passed a law making it okay to profiteer off of war so they could gouge the taxpayers for - checks earpeice ohhh. That’s right, they did.
The resolution to illegally attack Iraq purposefully left out the war profiteering.
Still though. Both sides bad, let’s all listen to the FSB and not vote.
Yeah, it's nice to think what could have been, but still feels like a long shot at best.
Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral college, and while a staged right-wing riot caused significant confusion, and ultimately the Democratic party decided that 'decorum' was more important than stopping the conservative movement.
History isn't inevitable, but nothing has fundementally changed about how Liberals and Democrats view strategy and politics; this should cause to to strongly consider the value or wisdom of statements like Blue No Matter Who, if even when victorious, they refuse to take it.
Its not a long shot. It actually is the timeline we should be on and Gore was *impeccably clear about climate change being his priority. He won, by both the electoral college final count and the popular vote. The election was stolen from the American people but is relegated to a modern folk tale, in-spite of it actually being reality.
Gore absolutely did not make climate change his priority in 2000. That's just a straight up lie. He campaigned almost entirely on the economy and reforming social security and Medicare. Climate change was NOT a top issue for voters or for Gore in 2000.
Oh no, we might have gotten social security and Medicare funding fixed, so people today wouldn’t be looking at poverty in their old age? What would gen z be if they were allowed hope and dreams?
And imagine a presidential candidate willing to fix intractable long term problems, who was later found to be very serious about climate change?
Honestly doubt it. Money talks. Also the president doesn't make the laws.
There would still be a problem because while the USA have a big responsibility in the fight against climate change, they are far from the only country that needs to do something about it. It's an us problem, not just a U.S. problem.
As the world's financial powerhouse, the United States has both an outsized effect on climate change relative to our population, but also power to do something about it that extends far beyond our borders. Both treaties and commercial agreements can be used to lever other nations into responsible climate policies; we've been doing this with just about everything else for our entire existence. You ever wonder why weed is illegal everywhere in the world at about the same time? Or copyright laws that destroy the public domain? We did that. We could use that power for good, as well.
It seems like most other developed countries have been taking it more seriously. We could have been part of that group
In developing world, think of all the energy projects since then, that could have leapfrogged the technology directly to renewables. Heck, the extra decade or two of “free” energy could well have altered their economies
The thing is this is China too. I do buy their point that in many ways they have still been a developing country, they still have had so much population to bring forward, so much progress to make, while also being the worlds manufacturer. And when they’re in, they’re all in. Yeah they’ve continued to build coal, and maybe the US being serious about climate change could have influenced that for the last few decades, but everyone needs to remember that while they continued to build coal, they also were taking the worlds biggest steps in Renewables. This could have happened earlier.
Of course, but a country with the means the US have should lead by example. They don't have a "big" responsibility, they have the greatest.
is so fucked up that the future of the world depends on one single country, and more exactly, one single person in that country
This is an extreme exaggeration. Supposing you could wave a magic wand and zero out all US emissions and waste beginning in the year 2000, we'd still be just as fucked due to China and India's emissions. And guess what, neither of those nations give a fuck about sticking to climate treaties. China manipulates its stats on virtually every useful metric, and India has a position that they deserve to finish industrializing.
I would rather have 50 states that agree on a plan of action than one guy fighting against the entirety of the federal government.
Good luck with that. I doubt there's one single thing for which that is possible besides maybe "George Washington was the first president".
Congress existed at the time
And was controlled entirely by Republicans.
Al Gore is fine, it's Tipper I don't care for.
Consequences: 2030
Not there will be anyone left to suffer the proof.
Al Gore was a new runner for president after serving vice president for the two immediately previous terms, and was 52 at time of running.
Biden is an incumbent who served two vice president terms which he finished 8 years ago, and he is currently 81.
Now tbf, the orange definitely made Bush look like a competent and coherent president in comparison. But comparing Al Gore to Biden is kinda dumb. I expect Biden's huge train plan to go about as well as Obama's huge train plan of which he was also a part of.
It's not that both sides are the same, it's that they're both corporately backed which means nothing substantial will actually be achieved besides not shooting yourself in the foot like what Republicans like to do.
Also keep in mind the 2000 election was stolen by the supreme court because that power is totally valid against actual votes.
is there anyone at all concerned about climate change in 2024?
Thanks tankie
You all honestly deserve it. Even if I burn too.
What, are you a fucking alien that lives outside the earth?
I am someone who knows how you all act and am completely fed up with it.
You need to fucking grow up before it's too late.
I am going to just leave the U.S. when the shit hits the fan. You are the only ones who are going to suffer. And even if I do, it won't matter, because you brought this upon yourselves.
Good bye and good riddance, idiot
Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split you.
Both sides are equally bad, but one side is more equal than the other.
It's a quote from george orwell - animal farm i believe.
You're using it wrong.
This is bullshit. Climate change wasn't a thing for Gore until he went looking for another job. If he had been president everything would still be the same....militaristic and corporate. And remember that he is a Southern conservative whose wife wanted music banned but had to settle for warning stickers.
You Enlightened Centrists sure do love selective glorification of the past
Biden is president and emissions are even worse since he started
We're also drilling more oil than ever before.
Almost like a war broke out that cut America's allies off from their usual stocks of oil and raising prices globally including on non-oil-product goods or something!
Wanna gripe? Gripe in context.
I wasn’t griping and understand the context.
But that just underscores the idea that even if Al Gore had taken office there’s no telling what his climate legacy would have been.
You think Al Gore winning would have prompted Putin to invade Ukraine twenty years early?
That is not at all what they said and you should be fucking embarrassed. They were saying that electing gore in 2000 wouldn't have (necessarily) prevented Putin from invading Ukraine. But I think you probably understand that. You're just being a piece of shit.
My point is that even while pretending to acknowledge context they're trying to throw it in the bin.
Not my fault that there's only so nice a way to point out that what someone's trying to base their argument on is horseshit.
You’re needlessly antagonistic.
Gore would have had to respond to events, including drilling more oil which would undermine his climate efforts.
What I’m saying is presidents live in the real world like the rest of us and make decisions they don’t want.
You do understand things take time right?
Its like watching a train speeding towards a barrier, steadily accelerating faster and faster, full throttle, and saying well it takes time to come to a full stop. No brakes applied, no taking the foot off the gas. Im not even accusing him of doing nothing, he's actively worsening climate change.
Except the foot is being taken off the gas, or in the analogy coal is beyond fed in slower, or some coal is beyond replaced with renewables, but you're amazed the train is still going. Like Geez industrial and power momentum is freaking hard to change, we're not going to turn off all the fossil power plants, ice cars, and change every industrial process in a measly 3 years.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-u-s-oil-production-reached-an-all-time-high-in-2023
You're blinded by the D next to his name, never in the history of the world have we been worsening climate change faster.
Taking foot off the gas is emissions peaking, remaining steady, not being higher than the previous year. Hitting the brakes is reducing emissions to less than the previous year. We have to do that for a long time before we stop contributing to climate change, as it's all cumulative.
I think you, like many, expect the entire freaking world to change in a couple of years. You have no idea how much there is to do and how much industry there is out there. You have to keep voting it in for decades. It's not one and done. Sorry but you have no idea how the world works. But go ahead and don't vote in stupid protest and we can start again from scratch in 8-16 years (remember it's been 23 years since we could have started with Gore, but go ahead and don't vote.)
And BTW I didn't say hitting the brakes, I said less coal being put in. Momentum is a bitch. That's what the world is. Buut you don't seem to realize that and just want to complain. Chow.
PS you're the one actually blinded by a D next to the name because you expect everything to change because of that D in 2 freaking years (when he had control of the house).
And this is the reason it’s a crisis. Climate change is a long process, as is changing the entire world economy to face it. It’s not a crisis because of disruptive weather this year, but because we’ve already set in motion changes to the atmosphere that will inexorably make much more serious changes for at least the next century. Even changing just one small sector of emissions, changing internal combustion to battery electric vehicles, will take a couple decades, and is facing constant resistance by conservatives. One small sector. We have to change the entire world economy. There is so much work ahead and we’re already out of time to prevent serious climat consequences. Starting a couple decades earlier would have made a huge difference (although EV technology wasn’t up to it, so we’d focus on other things).
People can’t seem to look at a graph and internalize what it means when the line keeps going steeply up into the future, but Al Gore clearly could. People can’t seem to conceptualize that some actions have long term results, but Al Gore clearly could
Agreed. On batteries this is where I go back to the 70s. When the oil embargo happened they should have been R&Ding hard for better batteries (and solar and nuclear and fusion). If they started some serious battery R&D back then we would be incredibly better off.
And we should have gone off coal in the 80s. AFAIK there was enough NG to replace it, at least in North America.
Horseshit
And then Obama won and he fixed the climate crisis and didn't start any wars. Good thing we finally learned to vote for Democrat! Both sides schmoth sides!
And Genocide Joe of course is fixing every single issue right now. Such as killing all Palestinians which is the most important issue as all the Democrats focus goes to keeping israel's Genocide going.
Assuming that all democrats across the last 24 years are all the same is utterly unreasonable.
Assuming that anything would have been fixed if people voted for the Democrat guy in one single election is utterly delusional. Imperialism has been a thing under Democrats as much as under Republicans
If a Democrat would not do imperialism he would quite literally get killed by the CIA
PFFFFFT Yeah OK. Al Gore is not the messiah, and "being aware" and acting on it are two very different things.
And being aware of a problem and flatly denying that it exists are also two very different things. OPs greater point holds; 'both sides' arguments are fallacies.
The oldest millennials in 2000 were 19 years old.
OP are you trying to finger wag us for decisions made by Boomers?
Nobody mentioned millennials or boomers.
I did.
I'll rephrase, why did you mention millennials when millennials weren't being targeted by the meme?
Who do you suppose OP was targeting?
People who would use the "both sides" logical fallacy in debates. Nothing about this post is directed at a specific generation.
So are you assuming OP has no idea what the average age of Lemmy users are? Or the average age of people who think Joe Biden is a strike blocking, genocide supporting piece of shit?
I’m not convinced one president of one country 24 years ago would make any difference today. This seems very America-pilled
Do you think George W. Bush did any amount of damage to the world?
I agree that GB did an insane amount of damage to our country and Trump is the same way. But for all the damage that has been done, it doesn't feel like democrats have been able to achieve a comparable amount of good. I understand the mechanics on "why" they are unable to (a big tent coalition up against a unified party of fanatics) but it's for that reason that I might agree that Al Gore, despite his best intentions, may have been railroaded in his efforts to establish the US as a climate leader.
I'm curious, but are you at all aware of the legislation that has passed in the last three years....?
I feel like the undertone of this question is "clearly you don't know what the Dems have done, otherwise you'd feel differently." Maybe I'm way off base with that, but there isn't any legislation that Dems have passed during Biden's term that even comes close to undoing or reversing the damage of the Trump presidency. Feel free to argue your case, but I would put special emphasis on these points:
I'm sure I missed a couple, but it is asinine to think that anything Joe Biden has accomplished has "fixed," or even started to fix, any of these things.
Did anyone claim Joe's cabinet fixed all the ills of the last administration? The fundamental comment being thrown around by the likes of /u/nicolairathjen and their other equivocating pals is that the current administration has been ineffective at actualizing any good despite having a really long list of achieved results. There is this fatalist attitude floating around, but every time you ask people how much they know about what is actually going on on a policy level it's crickets. Your 5 point bullet list is evidence alone at what an impact a cabinet can have so what are we even arguing any more?
Forget the world, do you not think US has had an outsized affect on the environment and climate change specifically?
But yes, having lived through that, so many times other countries had no need to take the environment seriously because the US didn’t. Sometimes there was influence. Sometimes it was merely the biggest polluter
Yes he would know, no it wouldn’t have helped. It’s a global thing, not a local thing.
Biden is president right now and is doing nothing the people need, so no, there's no difference.
Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?
I’d like to think that in that timeline, we never got past the point of TFG sticking to his shitty ass TV shows.
Doubt.
It absolutely, 100% no-doubt, are-you-even-joking would have been better. But my idiot friends all voted Nader to register their displeasure. Stupid fucks.
I disagree. There’s only so much one man would have been able to do. After 9/11, he would have lost all buy-in from the public as the War on Terror started. Who would care about saving the planet if they are worried about terrorist attacks?
The Kyoto Protocol would have been ratified. Could you imagine if we had an international agreement with legally-binding emissions reductions in place in 2000? The Paris Agreement is the best we have, and it’s simply not as strong as Kyoto would have been
We can do two things at the same time you know. And the way industry and electrical grid changes work is over a long period of time. You move the needle at the start and the path change is dramatic.
No Iraq War, "No Child Left Behind" never becomes a thing, Bin Laden gets caught in Afghanistan if the 9/11 plot even manages to happen since Bush is known to have ignored a report containing a warning about the attacks being planned.
You really wanna tell me that a world without the war on terror would be exactly as bad as the one we live in today? Especially one without the war on terror where the century kicks off with a president who takes the climate crisis seriously?
Fuck, even just excluding the war in Iraq makes a huge fucking difference.
You’re taking quite a bit of a leap there about 9/11 being foiled because Gore was in office. I really don’t think that it would have been sunshine and lollipops like what has been suggested. He’s one man. I have a hard time believing one man would have made the difference in terms of 9/11.
I was 17 during that election, otherwise I would have voted for him. I think he could have done some great things, but I’m not so sure those great things would have made massive waves that would change today.
🤷🏻♀️
Edit: format more better next time.
Bush ignored an attack imminent report that basically spelled out the intent of Al Qaeda to launch an attack via the hijacking of airplanes. Gore likely would not have, as gore is not as dumb as Bush is well known to be.
Even if that terrorist attack wasn’t foiled, there were many possible ways to respond to it. It’s naive to think that would have unfolded the same way
One of the key findings was that poor transition because of the election mess led to lack of intelligence briefings, etc and thus lack of decisions.
I mean, this is just kinda dummy thiccc reasoning. Looks good from the outside, but vapid and lacking substance.