I asked for a gender inclusive restroom, was gaslighted those things take time. I then emailed CEO cc’ed chair of board of directors. It was converted in 2 days.
If America was a school we'd have one party full of bullies smoking in the bathroom who don't give a shit if one of their ranks breaks the rules so long as it's not messing with them personally, and we've got another party full of brown nosers who will run and tell the teacher any time someone even thinks about using the wrong kind of pencil. Neither is good for the student body as a whole, but in very different ways.
I would like to think that Bernie Sanders is one of those people.
Republicans have a propaganda network back then to fight against Obamacare (which isn't even Medicare for all). It was really surprising how much the Republicans fought back given the zeitgeist was going the other way with Michael Moore and all that. The whole "death panel" stuff took the air out of the room and Republicans were going on non-stop about how it was the greatest injustice to all of America. It was wild.
Also, if you look at those that benefit from Obamacare and the fact that they're losing it. They still hate that it's associated at all with the Dems. It's weird.
Burn down systems of oppression, then. Oh wait. That also magically takes time because this stupid platitude is just the latest in a long line of excuses from the pawl of the ratchet.
Yes, Democrats like to whine that they only got 60 votes in the Senate for a short period during Obama's term. You want to know the last time Republicans had 60 votes in the Senate? 1911.
It's been over a century since Republicans had that kind of majority, and I think back then the filibuster had a larger threshold to overrule, so they probably didn't even have a filibuster-proof majority even then. You probably have to go back to Reconstruction to find Republicans with that kind of majority.
Do you know how Republicans dismantle programs without a filibuster-proof majority? They do it by cutting funding. They cut funding to programs and zero out their budgets. The program still exists in legislation; it just isn't funded.
To fix that damage does not require breaking a filibuster. It just requires properly funding those programs again. And funding can be passed with just a simple majority.
And of course, much of what Republicans do is done by executive order, and that can easily be reversed by the next Democratic president.
Republicans are a monolith and vote in lockstep. Democrats are an un-unified big tent party encompassing every ideology from identical to republicans to social democrats. If everybody that doesn't vote would vote for progressive candidates in every democratic primary and general we'd have a unified left of center party that could accomplish things. But instead of doing literally the only thing that can walk back the fascism all y'all keep working to get republicans elected.
If they truly get a majority to override the president, or in the future can then make the tri fecta again, it's easy to fix shit. Just make it what it was before, blast it through committees like the Republicans do with hardly a word from someone else. The question then is are Democrats incompetent or complicit.
Have you ever broken an arm? A window? A car? A heart?
Fixing things takes time.
That doesn't excuse not starting when given a chance. The focus should be on establishment Dems' failures to start fixing things, not on setting some unrealistic expectation that all it would take is a snap of the fingers and bippity boppity boo.
Netanyahu's whim isn't about fixing things, more like breaking everything in Gaza, Iran, and southern Lebanon.
If you really think Gaza can be rebuilt as fast as it's been destroyed, you're going to have some unpleasant surprises whenever the world can pull itself out of this death spiral and start caring about humanity again...
How much time? Ideally none. But the real world isn't idealistic, and breaking more shit because you can't have what you want right now is what petulant children do.
I'm not defending the establishment Dems' inaction, but I am cautioning against setting unrealistic expectations. Even if you vote out all the republicans and replace all the democrats with progressives, it will still take time to fix things.
And people's ignorance about this fact is a key part of the republican strategy that keeps getting them reelected every other election cycle. They always break shit on their way out, leaving a mess for their successors to clean up, and they blame it all on the democrats in office after them.
So promoting this idea that you can fix everything overnight is only helping the republicans.
Incrementalism is a tool of fascism to prevent progress.
No, incrementalism is a necessary reality. The reason it doesn't work is partly because the right people aren't in office to implement it, and partly because when the right people are in office they don't have enough time in office to implement it fully.
Get someone with the right intentions in office (a progressive), and give them enough time (at least two terms), with a congress that supports their agenda, and you'll see incrementalism work as it's intended.
Or you can complain that you can't have everything you want immediately, and attack anyone who doesn't give you everything you want right now, and when they never get into office for long enough with enough congressional support because nobody can pass your purity test, you'll have plenty to complain about when literally nothing good gets done because you categorically rejected the idea of incrementalism.
California has a bulletproof Democrat supermajority and does not have livable wages, universal healthcare, affordable housing, affordable COL. So the argument that Democrats need more time Is verifiably false
Did I ever claim establishment Dems are willing to put in the necessary changes to move progress forward? Because California Dems are about as establishment/corporatist as you can freaking get.
I never said "give establishment Dems another chance." I said "fixing things takes time," and that will still apply even if you oust all the establishment Dems and replace them with progressives.
Please take your strawman argument somewhere else if you're not going to actually read what I wrote and respond to that.
They'll give Trump a golden parachute, wish him the best, then continue the ratchet effect. Neo-liberals are as much enemies of democracy as the reactionaries.
Assume that Democrats win the next presidential election and enough seats in both the House and Senate to take meaningful actions.
Assume that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.
Assume that Trump doesn't die in office.
If all of the above come to pass, and Trump doesn't face real legal consequences for his actions, then it's another in the long line of flashing neon signs telling would-be dictators that America is up for grabs for whoever strikes first.
The termination for any reason is at-will employment, aka "will to work". With that being said your point still stands because "right to work" is an anti union law that guarantees an employees right to refrain from being part of a union (lol). Both terms are dumb.
At-will employment and "right-to-work" are distinct ideas. The first has some real benefits, while the other is just union-busting bullshit.
At-Will Employment means that the relationship of employee to employer is technically voluntary. Your employer can fire you or lay you off for almost any reason or no reason, but you are likewise free to just walk away without even finishing your shift and get another job. (Non-discrimination laws and professional continuity-of-care rules are common exceptions.)
Right to work doesn't affect whether or not your employement relationship is voluntary. Instead, it means only and exclusively that you can freeload off the union, getting all of their benefits and leaving them with all of the expenses of negotiating your salary and work rules.
In the USA most (but not all) states are "at-will employment", and most red states have the same sort of bullshit anti-worker "right to work" laws that MLK was campaigning against when he was murdered. And, unfortunately, thanks to SCOTUS fuckery all of the USA is essentially "right to work" since the same assholes behind "corporations are people" and "money is speech" decided that payroll deductions for union dues are terrible in way that payroll deductions for taxes or insurance aren't.
The problem with at-will is the unequal relationship corporations and employees have. If I, as an employee, simply walk off the job, that hurts my chances of employment at other corporations. A company, however, will never see any consequence no matter how badly they treat employees.
Exactly. You can walk away and get evicted and starve vs. they can make you walk away and get evicted and starve… This is what constitutes fairness by modern democratic standards, apparently.
Understand that the precursor to at-will employment was that you walk away from your job and get arrested for breaking contract, and your family gets evicted without you able to earn money to pay for their food or shelter.
Like the other commenter says, it's extremely flawed but serves a purpose.
But it's also kinda like Republicans saying they'll "repeal then replace" the ACA. You need the plan for the replacement beforehand, otherwise you just return to the old problems.
That's still the law under at will employment, if you sign a contract, you can't just quit anymore. We lost the protection of one year contracts, like you really think it's better for employers to be able to fire you with no warning than having one year contracts?? This all happened centuries ago of course
"Right to work" means you can't be required to join the union, but the union is still required to bargain for you without you contributing to it. Its designed to defund and kneecap organized labor. It has nothing to do with firing.
At will employment is what lets the employer fire at any time, and that is the law in 49 of the states.
I see a lot of discourse around this theory that when Democrats are in power they’ll reverse everything this regime has done. Yes this is a comforting thought but it’s way too much to expect from the Democratic Party as we know it now.
The Executive branch has been given (and has taken) an extreme amount of power to the point where the balance we once knew is now nonexistent. Does anyone think for one second the next president will just forfeit those gains? What incentive is there? And as we’ve seen and continue to see, who will hold them to account?
My bet is that we’ll see a few easy ‘gimme’ reversals that are enough to enable our slide back into the complacency we so desperately crave.
The last time Democrats had a filibuster -proof legislative trifecta it was for 3 months and they passed Obamacare. When they don't have Republicans blocking them every step of the way, they actually do work to improve things. They aren't perfect by a long shot, but Democrats are the best of two options by far.
Obamacare was the implementation of a 1989 Heritage Foundation plan to implement an individual mandated health care system.
Also by no available metric did Obamacare "improve things". Healthcare costs rose significantly above the pre-ACA trend, bankruptcy increased, and health outcomes plummeted across nearly all metrics.
now they just deny coverage with AI generated reasons and force you to nag and beg for them to pay what they're obligated to. much better! and before that they just paid some corrupt physician to sit on staff and make up bullshit reasons to deny coverage.
Sure, but you're assuming that "coverage" leads to better outcomes. I remember diabetes being one of the big ones at the time and is avery maneagble disease.
So, what was the hospitalization rate before and after? Did it decrease as was promised? Is diabetes unique or does this trend hold for the majority of those "pre-existing conditions"?
Also by no available metric did Obamacare "improve things"
Wrong. The number of insured people went up. The uninsured rate dropped to a historic low of 7.7% by 2023. That is a tangible improvement in the lives of millions of Americans.
Just because you don't have insurance doesn't mean more people don't have insurance. Obamacare didn't create high insurance prices. That was happening no matter what. Also remember that Republicans tried to repeal the ACA more than 70 times and stripped several elements from the plan, so of course it isn't working as well as we would want.
I didn't question whether more had insurance. I questioned the quality and utility of the insurance they were forced to purchase by penalty of fine. One of the elements the republicans stripped was that fine, which existed entirely as a handout to insurance companies who swore up and down that having to cover preexisting conditions would bankrupt them unless you forced everyone to buy their "product". (Not that the republicans did it out of any altruism or anything, they just wanted to use that as part of a ploy to repeal the ACA entirely, which failed)
Republicans stripped the fine because that hurt the ACA. Insurance depends on healthy people paying in to cover the sick. The bigger the pool of insured, the lower the costs for everyone. This all falls apart if young, healthy people just chance it and skip having insurance. If you make people pay a fine even if they don't have insurance, this removes the incentive to skip getting insurance (which keeps prices down).
You are assuming that having insurance is correlated to physical or financial health and is therefore an improvement.
Rationally that makes sense, that's what it's supposed to do. Empirically the data shows an overall negative correlation between private healthcare rates and general healthcare outcomes.
It's true that the uninsured rate went from 17% pre-ACA(2010 when it was signed) to 10%(2016 2 years after it was implemented at an uninsured local minima) which is ~18 million people. However in that same timespan average annual health expenditures, for the entire US population, doubled from $1600 per person per year to $3200. Pre-ACA trend would've resulted in ~$2200.
That's a difference of ~4.87 trillion dollars stolen by "healthcare" corporations from individuals over the last 14 years.
The ACA would have passed much faster if they didn't try "working across the aisle" with the Republicans. If I remember, the original plan was to expand medicare to encompass more people who need it but negotiated to what Mitt Romney passed in his state while governor. Then the Republicans all voted against what they wanted. So the Democrats are either a paid opposition party or so absolutely naive to the dealings of Republicans and keep stepping on that rake. As well instead of making it a stepping stone they don't really talk about improving it either. Also in that time they could have enshrined abortion rights into law that is harder to overthrow than a supreme court ruling.
No matter how your parse things, the Democrats aren't good.
I agree, the Democrats aren't good, but they aren't actively evil like the Republicans. They are naive, idealistic, and out of touch, but they are the only party that (for the most part) practices democracy.
“Not good” isn’t better than “actively evil” if it consistently shows it does nothing to put itself between the evil and it’s victims, nor does anything to break down the systems of evil when it has the advantage. The modern Democrat politicians are not some newcomer on the political scene, they’ve had their ups and downs over the decades but even when the balance of power is in their favor they mete out “progress” at a minimum only when they have to, tell their constituents “that’s the best we can do”, then applaud themselves like they’ve changed the world. They are absolutely out of touch, not just with their voters, but with the fact MAGA is not the Republican Party of Reagan and Bush that was going to play political pendulum and trade power back and forth every couple of election cycles while having a gentleman’s agreement that bureaucracy and preservation of the system for the benefit of the elite is the goal.
If you don't think Democrats haven't been standing in the way of Republicans, you haven't been paying attention. Democrats blocked the SAVE act which would disenfranchise millions of American citizens, they just successfully blocked DHS funding over ICE, they just blocked $1 billion for Trump's stupid ballroom, they are blocking the Fair Tax act which would eliminate income tax and the IRS, HR 899 which would eliminate the Department of Education, HR722 which would define life at conception, HR28 which is an anti-trans sports bill, HR129 which would abolish the ATF, and on and on and on.
Why didn't Biden prosecute Trump for insurrection from Jan. 6th? He still believes you need a Republican party at all, like we need people further right than the Democrats. They could have prevented this entire situation by going after the organizers, of Trump stealing documents alone. But they slow walked us into this.
Because the executive branch doesn't have the power to prosecute anyone. The legislature tried to impeach Trump over Jan6 but that was blocked by Republicans. The classified documents case was slow-walked by a Trump loyalist judge until he was reelected and became immune from prosecution. The law did go after the organizers and many were hauled only to be pardoned by Trump. Democrats did all the law allowed.
You and them are so out of touch with reality that you both think playing the old political game represents “standing in the way”. Blocking the SAVE act doesn’t do shit when your opponent is gerrymandering the maps in their favor. People will still be able to vote, they’ve just rigged the system so that who votes where will reliably favor them. And in places democrats control they’re playing the same game in their favor instead of fighting to eliminate the concept altogether. Blocking funding for the ballroom isn’t going to stop him from building it, it’s just going to force him to do it illegally, as he done with so many other projects, at which point they resort to grandstanding condemnation and strongly worded letters. They might have prevented abolishing the Department of Education but they have spent decades allowing it to become a tool in the dumbing down of America’s youth to the point it’s now run by a WWE exec, and frankly I’m not sure allowing it to exist in that condition is the better option. Blocking legislation that codifies anti-trans and life at conception beliefs is showmanship when you do nothing to stop the illegal enforcement of those beliefs by jackboots who deny access to healthcare. MAGA is running on action first, normalizing the violence and denial of rights illegally, then trying to make it the legal standard after and Democrats are acting like blocking the legislation somehow prevents what is currently happening from occurring.
Blocking ICE funding doesn’t block ICE. The goon squads weren’t pushed out of communities by press conferences and letters to the president. They were blocked and pushed out by citizens who put their safety and lives on the line, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, in defense of strangers. Meanwhile Democratic leaders postured for their next campaign run and took to trolling the regime on social media with witty memes. Your leaders have risked nothing and therefore achieve empty victories while the people they supposedly serve are arrested, beaten, disenfranchised, denied rights, dehumanized, raped, molested, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t give a fuck that what they’re doing is illegal because the legal system is in their hands and standing up to them requires more than saying “no” because they don’t respect personal boundaries. You literally have to block them with force equal to or greater than what they’re coming at you with, just ask Alex Periti.
Like I said, this isn’t the Regan or Bush regime that nominally had some sort of respect for the game of power trades, this is fascism. It’s going to walk over us all whether it has the legal justification and funding to do so or not.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
Following the law isn't "playing a political game". Giving Republicans an excuse to remove Democrats from power wouldn't help anyone. Did you even know that there are no more US deportees in Salvadoran prisons? That is because Democrats fought for their freedom. Those people were helped and that's not nothing. Real resistance isn't charging in guns blazing. It is showing up every day and saving who you can. Martyrs don't save anyone.
You're making the point for us. Obamacare is a 90s conservative proposal, it also completely killed the possibility of single payer healthcare for a generation. Republicans ratchet things right and then Democrats lock it in, great example you provided thank you.
Yup. And they did a switch to remove the public option, since they had an obvious ability with 60 votes. They had Lieberman play the rotating villain, and removed the public option so they could supposedly get GOP votes.
When they got no GOP votes, they passed it anyways, through reconciliation - but didn't put the public option back in. They literally chose to leave it out.
Not only a 90s conservative proposal, it was written by the Heritage Foundation. Democrats have never found legislation written by them that they didn't love.
Obamacare was a compromise because single payer didn't have the votes. If you think single payer was happening at any point in the last generation, I have a bridge to sell you.
Those people always could have purchased health insurance. The difference after Obamacare was they would be penalized if they didn't. That's just an objective fact.
Obamacare subsidizes healthcare specifically for people who couldn't afford it before. The only people it penalized were rich people who refused to get healthcare. The fee was waived for most.
Why do Democrats have to compromise with Republicans but Republicans never have to compromise with Democrats?
Why must they work with the party that has shifted towards fascism? Why must they compromise on half baked laws that don't do the things people wanted, but corporations got what they demanded?
Why do the Democrats work with fascists while refusing to stand up for the good of the country?
And then their sycophants will tell you that it's a normal thing to give the people who want to bring back American laws from the 1950s what they want, and you're a idealist fool if you think we should advocate for good laws.
The best to all of that is Democrats generally operate on good faith and Republicans don't. It is easy to hold your ground if you don't care who it hurts.
Romney may have signed it, but keep in mind Massachusetts is a blue state and the state Senate at that time had 35 Dem seats and only 5 Republican. It was a bipartisan bill, but mostly Democrat.
Continuing with the status quo would have left millions without health insurance, including many with pre-existing conditions who desperately needed it. It wasn't perfect, but it was an improvement.
It was written by the heritage foundation, it was the best way to maximize profits for the health insurance industry.
Yeah my life is so much better now that i have to pay a copay on top of my premiums instead of not having insurance and just having a regular old pay at the end of a visit. And Oh wow, I get a free flu shot and checkup once a year for my $5,000 a year in premiums. Oh and if i have a major health emergency i van declare bankruptcy on the $15000 deductible instead of declaring bankruptcy on the full cost of the surgery. Neat!
There's a reason republicans never repealed obamacare, because it makes the health insurance companies too much money.
Let's say you didn't have insurance and were just counting on paying out of pocket. You are just living your life and BAM, you have a massive heart attack. Turns out you had an undiagnosed heart defect and there is nothing that could have prevented it or predicted it. You're taken by ambulance to the hospital where you have open heart surgery and where you stay for weeks to recover. You get a huge bill that you can't pay. What happens?
The doctors and nurses did a lot of work to keep you alive and they deserve to get paid. The hospital has to keep the lights on. You filing for bankruptcy doesn't change this. That is why everyone needs to have insurance. This kind of thing can happen to anyone at any time. As a society we can't just let people die if they can't afford treatment. Even if you take for-profit companies out of the equation, the whole system collapses with millions of people unable to pay.
That is why everyone has to pay premiums. Part of that payment is for vaccinations and check ups, but part of it is coverage in case catastrophic shit happens. Healthy people get the least back out of the system, but nobody knows if they will still be healthy tomorrow. The bigger the pool of healthy people paying into the system, the less each person needs to pay to cover the people whose luck ran out.
Which is why it's not an accomplishment for dems. Even with that brief super majority the best they could do is copy republicans plans. Which is also why the GOP can't make any legislation to replace it as it's already their plan.
Which then gets back to the point of the post
Edit, because people still don't understand they based it on Romneycare
I don't know that Republicans have ever had a 60 vote majority in the Senate. You need 60 votes to make fundamental changes to the system that the opposition will not support. Things like constitutional amendments.
Sure. But we need to come back to the original question. Why do Democrats need 60 votes to fix something that Republicans didn't need 60 votes to destroy?
There is no third option until both a better option arises and one of the two existing parties is weakened enough to be supplanted. We aren't anywhere close on either front.
We do have a better option: it's called the Green Party. I do agree that the Democrats are nowhere near weak enough to be replaced, but that could change very rapidly depending upon how the next few years turn out.
The Green Party is not a realistic option. The best they have ever done is 2.7% of the popular vote for president and they have never held a single Senate or House seat. I think the more likely event is that the right splits into MAGA and America First parties, allowing a left supermajority that then splits into Progressive and a traditional Democrat parties.
The Green Party is not a realistic option. The best they have ever done is 2.7% of the popular vote for president and they have never held a single Senate or House seat.
...which is a lot more than any other leftist political party is doing. This is due to how difficult it is to get a party up and running, and then keep it running. Which we Greens have done for decades.
Plenty of people have thought they could do better, and where are those parties now?
It makes a lot more sense to join a party which has already done that hard work, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
There is a fly ramming against my window right now. That doesn't mean it is doing more than the other flies to knock my house down. No leftist party has come anywhere close to challenging Democrat power. All the third parties combined wouldn't even come close. Throwing a penny into a well and wishing for another party option would be just as effective as supporting the Greens.
It's funny because that is basically the same argument people used when Social Security was established. A functional society can't have people just dying in the street. It costs money to fix this, so it is not unreasonable to ask people to pay for it. Everyone needs healthcare eventually whether or not they are insured. People without insurance still get care which raises the prices for everyone who does have insurance. The more people who pay in, the cheaper coverage is for everyone. Making everyone be covered is simply making people pay for what they use. It's simple economics.
Yeah, I agree private insurance companies suck, but that's an entirely different problem, i.e.capitslism as a whole.
Must feel weird without the bot network that would upvote your kind of ignorant takes and overall shitty attitude that existed on reddit.
Your "debate style" is very reminiscent of a MAGAts. Maybe start listening and using that brain of yours to gain a wrinkle instead of constantly sticking to your dogma that has helped create the current situation in the U.S.
They bought into fascist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The fascist playbook has always been to divide the left with infighting so they can't provide a unified resistance. It has happened over and over again throughout history, but they can't put aside minor disagreements to fight a literal existential threat.
This is part of what just erodes the hope out of me. We all know there are periods of regression and periods of progress, but whatever damage is caused by the regression period is
1- Caused much more quickly than any progress.
2- Is usually beneficial to the ruling class, thus they have less of an incentive to fix it.
3- Might just become normalized, at which point you're just starting from square one all over again.
Like, age/identity verification. We are in a period of mass and widespread regression right now and age verification is making progress, eroding freedom and privacy on the internet. Do you think that when we enter the period of progress, the age verification systems of today will just be reverted? Fuck no. They'll stay. They'll become normal. And the fight against them will need to start from scratch, with an ever bigger amount of opposition.
I'm really jealous of the people who can maintain hope.
On the hopeful side, socialism hasn’t had this many proponents since the 1910s-1940s. We’re making huge strides in overturning McCarthyist propaganda, and growing exponentially.
Performatively he did, then reinstated most of what he dropped. Did nothing with his tax cuts for the rich, which checks out, as VP he worked directly with McConnel to muster votes to make the bush tax cuts for the rich permanent. He kept his border policies, war policies, etc. Continued to lie about the condition of the economy. Blue Fascism is a close relative of the red version
The one that sticks out to me as an example was Cuba. In the very last days of Trump’s first term, he put Cuba on the official list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. This is patently absurd claim that has no evidence to support it. At the time, it was largely seen just as a move to make things just a little bit difficult for Biden. There was no reason to do it other than make life harder for the people of Cuba.
When asked about whether Biden was going to take Cuba off the list, Jen Psaki basically said Biden has more important issues to get to. He never removed Cuba off the list like he could have with just a stroke of a pen. Instead of meaningfully engaging with Cuba to foster better relations - something Obama valued and pursued in his foreign policy - Biden just kept them on the list as well as all the other ways in which Trump tried to crank up the temperature on the people of Cuba. Now here we are on the verge of a potential invasion of Cuba.
The only reason that Obama tried any type of foreign relations with Cuba was to get ahold of their proven treatment for lung cancer. Once Cuba revealed that they were not giving that to the US, things fell apart.
I have concluded that the Established Democrats would rather that Trump or somebody like him is POTUS than to concede to the Left on anything, even on a morally highly charged subject like the mass murdering of tens of thousand of children (in Gaza) which at least for some people would make the Democrat candidate so repugnant that they couldn't bring themselves to vote for her even "to stop Trump"
Had Kamala genuinelly conceded to the Left on some things and not latched on to none other than the Cheney familly (honestly, I don't thing the Israeli subject was by itself enough to cause that loss), she could very well have won, but that faction of the Democrats would rather loose than stop cozing with the hard-right, so they lost to none other than Trump.
If what the Democrat tribalists were parroting back them about how Trump was so horrible and the Democrats needed to win to stop his policies was indeed how the Established Democrats felt, they would NEVER had risked a Trump victory by adopting a Reject The Left strategy at all levels.
All this to say that these people will never undo what Trump did to the broader society (though the parts that make them less electable - i.e. that affect their own personal upsides - I'm sure they'll undo) because they're totally fine with it, as shown by how in the last election they would rather risk a second Trump presidency to keep on going Right politically than to pivot Left in the slightest of ways.
Without a Revolution inside the Democrat Party, the US will keep on going in the same direction as these Democrats will do nothing but talkie-talkie on reversing Trump's policies and then in a few years another Trump character (or, worse, a genuinelly intelligent one) get in power again.
I remember having this same conversation 20 years ago, except instead of Harris and Trump it was Kerry and Bush, and instead of Gaza it was Iraq. We didn't get somebody smarter than Bush, though, we got Trump.
Here's the thing. You don't need to be a smart president to do a lot of damage. You can have smart people in your cabinet. You also don't have to be very smart to break a ton of shit.
Then it's too bad that we have one party that loves that shit and one party that's willing to tolerate that shit as long as the minimum wage never rises again.
Spanberger is part of the paid opposition party. She will never do anything to take power away from capitol, and Republicans will do everything to give more power to capitol.
Spoiler: Democratic politicians wanted 80% of what Trump did. The 20% they didn't want was all him going after his democratic enemies ... but they take the bad with the "good".
That is how the ratchet works. Republicans go insane when they take office and make cuts to everything except military spending, then dems get in and cut military spending ... then feel like a bit of a calm after the storm. Dems dont reverse anything Republicans did ... eventually Republicans get back in and around we go again.
Of course there are two parties. They create the illusion of choice necessary for the political ratchet - one party to drive things to the right, the other as controlled opposition to obstruct movement back to the left.
I fear Dems will see just how easily we've bent over for the current administration, and realize they can get away with it too. I've said it ad nauseam -- when did we decide to start trusting the government? Any government? I'm right in the middle of my expected lifespan, and I never once trusted my government. Why would I? They've done nothing positive for my generation, and every slight success is quickly dismissed or disqualified by the next dipshit with deep enough pockets to rule the land. This isn't democracy, and it never has been. The "people's vote" has never mattered. It's just another smoke surrounded mirror providing the illusion that democracy exists. Hell, the only reason the word democracy probably exists in our history is to make us believe that such an impossibility is reality. Mark my words and those of others, the only difference between the two parties? One is full of fascist, pedophile, sex offenders and the other is full of fascist, pedophile, sex offenders. The female leaders in both parties are just enablers, otherwise they wouldn't put up with the shit and take to the streets. Same for our more diverse leaders. If they rock the boat too hard, they're out a paycheck and some sweet, sweet insider trading. The whole system is dead, and I fear revolution is the only answer to the madness. But we've become too complacent and docile to fight. We're too busy trying to make ends meet to have the necessary reserve energy to fight for rights which probably never truly mattered in the first place. Just stuff written down that **we're **advised to follow or face penalties. None of the people in power ever follow their own rules or the rules commanded by the people. When I say we are doomed to the point of extinction, I mean we are DOOMED. There's just no way for even the lamest human to find any reliability, accountability, or faith in governments that have outwardly shouted that they're not to be trusted and could give a shit about your life.
The next step wouldn't be abandoning democrats, it would be getting democrats in power, getting rid of the republicans (because they've provably turned into an enemy of the United States of America), and then creating an actual left party, and having the democrats become the new right wing.
For at least 5 minutes, I'd bet, we'd have a sane right wing.
This. We need to move the country to working for the people. The way you do this is by consistently voting for the best representative of the people. You don’t need to start by having the perfect option. If the most progressive candidate is a Democrat, even if they aren’t progressive, you vote them in. When the fascist consistently lose, then that democrat is the right wing which frees space for a more progressive candidate.
Leaping to a perfect candidate would be amazing. Taking steps in the right direction is still good and worth our energy.
Americans are fucked either way, and that's the crux of it. Both highly corrupt parties blowing smoke up their ass and they've all been socialized to regard third options as jokes, meanwhile the establishment is the real joke. There is no good solution, only shades of shit.
Why change the system when there is so much money to be made...
Political corruption is now embedded so deeply into the American system.
Foreign nations buy politicians, rich buy policies. The supreme court are now an extension of the republican party and those free holidays sure do help also they have jobs for life.
The president could nuke every blue state in America and not commit a crime.
It's fucked, it's a platform for dictatorship and corruption and political funding and grift has exacerbated it. Of course a party that has languished in powerless opposition isn't going to give any of that up. Of course they won't stop themselves insider trading.
And the military, they pledge a meaningless oath and are too weak to put an end to a tyrannical system.
...but one of the is actually not as bad for you as the other.
If the alternative to those two is to abstain from eating, then you will need to find an alternative source of nutrition. Those are the only two options in the pantry because you literally do not have the option to go to the store or plant a garden.
In this metaphor, we are comparing politics to food and the comparison breaks down
Stripped of imagery and stated simply:
the state that has a monopoly on violence is ensorcelled by the inheritors, takers and exploiters to limit our options but to consider those options as identical is irresponsible and foolish.
Adding neo to liberal is redundant. Just the word liberal is enough and the ACA is garbage and they gave you empty threat of it being taken away so you would clutch onto it and defend it tooth and nail. They know the public fears losing the few table scraps that get thrown at them
You are just a walking example of horseshoe theory. I can't tell if you are a Republican who hates the ACA because it came from a black president, or you are a lefty ideologue who would rather live under fascism than cooperate with a Democrat. There is really no way to know since you regularly lie.
You have settled for legislation written by Republicans to protect profits and capitalism. Then they used infantile tactics to convince you that you might lose your table scraps If you don't defend it.
And since you were completely clueless, Democrats are fascist, they've enabled our current political conditions along with Republicans. Republicans crank the fascism to the right and Democrats prevented from slipping back
And who do you think wrote Romneycare? The fucking Heritage Foundation. Democrats have never found legislation written by the HF that they didn't love.
All they got from the Heritage Foundation was the idea of the individual mandate which is hardly an original idea as it is shared by nearly all healthcare policies of developed countries.
Democrats have never found legislation written by the HF that they didn't love.
Objectively false. Democrats have been fighting Project 2025 tooth and nail.
Fighting so hard they pushed a candidate whose internal polling never showed they would beat trump. Fighting so hard they had no alternatives for it. BlueMAGA is as deranged as MAGA
Harris was barely left to Trump on a small amount of issues and on par with him with a very large amount. She and the party are first-term Trump Republicans
AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Katie Porter, Pramila Jayapal and the two examples I just mentioned. You're wrong.
This extreme left vision won't work if you only criticize democrats and it's giving space for MAGA to ruin the country. Why aren't they going.so hard against republicans as they do democrats? Where are the Gaza protests at trump rallies? This group is like a blue MAGA. Vibes, not victory or facts.
Can't call a spade a spade or my comments get deleted.
It doesn't matter anymore. The federal government is set to decay over the next decades. Eventually the federal government will lose a lot of economic leverage and blue states will just start doing shit on their own regardless of SCOTUS rulings. People in red states will get locked into a psuedo-feudal hellscape.
I'm getting out while I still can.
You accelerationists are getting what you wanted. Its just not going to result in what you thought.
You accelerationists are getting what you wanted. Its just not going to result in what you thought.
Accelerations didnt want destruction, they want the system to meaningfully evolve in the most expedient, most peaceful, most Just way possible. We stand in opposition to the "things will naturally just fix themselves if you make sure to vote dem in the primaries" crowd. (And to be clear, the republicans are hopeless)
Accelerations didnt want destruction, they want the system to meaningfully evolve in the most expedient, most peaceful, most Just way possible. We stand in opposition to the “things will naturally just fix themselves if you make sure to vote dem in the primaries” crowd.
What you want is immaterial to effective strategy. Voting/not-voting for an ideal is not something you do in the US. If you want the ideal, you work off a lesser liberal enemy by electing them and then doing on the ground work to undermine or challenge them with proper alternatives.
Instead we have fascists in power and I have never been more anti-motivated. Not demotivated, anti-motivated. Spite fuels me now. I'm a miserable wraith of what could have been, and I blame you and people like you.
You've dragged me into the mud and now the only way out that I could emotionally tolerate is to kick it into your face as I get out of the puddle.
HalfSalesman, have you considered that being so disappointed with reality that you have adopted a deathcult mentality is in fact evidence that you do not have a strong enough relationship with reality as it is? As in, an idealist mentality that does not consider human desire or the material world? I know I said that I wouldn't respond further, it's just tough to see someone so obviously unwilling to just give up the ideology of their enemies. So, I'm not making this comment to warrant a response, but to ensure that you do realize those questions are able to be asked.
Than those people definitely don’t deserve my help.
The thing is that your own life is affected by their decision.
Do you know what “First Past The Post” means?
People just have to vote majoritarily to third parties. By accepting the two party system and the lesser of two evil bullshit you are switching between slow decline and fast decline each 1 or 2 elections. Why would any politcian listen to you if they know that yo u will keep voting for them?
My better pre-2024 self didn't view political salvation through lesser evil electoralism on its own. Its one component of a multipart strategy. An important part but not the only one.
Voting third party is a waste because its simply a bet on a completely unrealistic outcome. Its like having voter's collectively buying a lottery ticket, with the added risk of total financial ruin.
Further, the green party only pops up during general presidential elections. They then disappear off the map every other year. They aren't a serious political project at best and a engineered spoiler at worst.
But whatever, we're litigating something that legitimately no longer matters.
There is no multipart strategy. Just American switching between the two parties every 1 or 2 elections
Voting third party is a waste because its simply a bet on a completely unrealistic outcome
Everything is unrealistic if people do not make effort
Further, the green party only pops up during general presidential elections. They then disappear off the map every other year. They aren’t a serious political project at best and a engineered spoiler at worst.
Bullshit. Greens no longer serve your political agenda so you stop caring about them and act like they are doing nothing when they are doing grassroot actions all over the year. While Harris only reappeared to sell her fucking stupid book.
What a fascinating comment. Liberal apathy, "it doesn't matter, the violence is inevitable," combined with some projected guilt onto a group of people not present in this post "accelerationists." Could you explain how accepting that fascist Dems will enact this violence and making decisions that require that violence to happen to make sense does not qualify as "accelerationism" in the vague way it is applied here?
I normally wouldn't comment on this because, honestly, it's usually pointless for me, but this comment along with your profile provides a great example of how liberals subscribe to fascism. It's worth noting that liberals historically get away with writing off "red states" because of the incredible wealth inequality between them (deserved in these narratives, of course, for their moral impurity of supporting the bad fascist party instead of the good fascist party despite everyone's purported understanding that the Republican party is predatory and anti-democratic) and the disproportionate African American population there relative to many "blue states." To prescribe "running" as a solution to genocide and socioeconomic disparity is, quite frankly, cruel; especially so if you consider how Native American and indigenous nations within US borders came to settle and survive where they are today. To suggest that the people who stay either to fight or live with their kin and land instead of run are absolutely powerless to defend themselves is about as clear of a settler-colonial imagination of history and human life that you can ask for. If we look at your profile more, we can see how deep this goes. Ecofascists tend to apply anti-natalism, and apathetic or doomer language to their futurities because it naturalizes the violence that is needed to maintain a capitalist, liberal system before it has happened while salvaging the perceived morality of its subscribers by constructing it as a result of the innate impurity of humanity rather than an imaginary future built from very specific values and assumptions. The kicker with your profile is the term "xenofeminist," which draws specifically on technological posthumanism in its criticism of gender and heteronormativity. For those unaware, posthumanism is meant to effectively decenter humans (and therefore, settler-colonial norms that commodify the entire material world and all life in it) but more often reproduces liberal narratives where settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism are natural human behaviours and that humanity is unretrievable from that impure nature save for the intentional transformation of the species (I hope I don't have to explain more how this easily results in eugenicist arguments). Many people who subscribe to it end up advocating for some immaterial, often technocratic solutionism. That you've combined that with some "soft" (unclear what you mean by that) anti-natalism, which ecofascists often use to once again construct humanity as the innate cause of capitalism's harm and legitimize genocide by an imagined necessity of "population control." All of that with some fun little death cult "vacuum decay" doomer talk. What a package here.
So, you've managed to create a narrative that, while apparently attempting to challenge or criticize fascist ideals, subscribes heavily to fascist historical narratives where the suffering and even eradication of particular groups is inevitable and in service of a more prosperous future for all, liberal constructions and relationalities of the material world that ultimately views any world that isn't beholden to human desires (including humanity as a species) as not one worth existing in, and explicitly discounts the death and suffering of racialized groups in the US that have historically been the targets of genocide for centuries. All of this while removing yourself from any sense of responsibility, since you cannot change the entire system by your will, and are powerless over the trajectory of these political and cultural developments and attributing guilt to some other group of people who also do not wield substantial power in this system and who subscribe to political action rooted in the same sense of inevitability, except in service of abolishing liberalism instead of maintaining it (assumingly, when you say that you hate "left or right" accelerationists and also want to forgive the people who didn't vote for Kamala Harris [how gracious] and view the election of Donald Trump as the cause of these events and not a symptom, it's difficult to believe you're talking about any other group than socialists or anarchists since fascists are inherently "accelerationist" ideologically). A crucial element in liberal complicity with fascism as well as how many of them advocate for ecofascism is that learned helplessness that only views total, nearly baptismal change in a liberal system as the only goal worth struggling for. For many privileged liberals who are unused to fighting, the end of the world is preferable to struggling to achieve less than utopia. Whether you want to or not, you have apparently adopted fascism into your imagination of the future.
I don't fit into whatever "accelerationis," is supposed to be, so please skip that as a response (and do not feel the need to respond at all), but I am deeply troubled by the amount of liberals I see who are going full fascist because of their disillusionment with this system; as though that isn't the strategy that Democrats have adopted. Since I actually am in groups that fascists target and have been targetted by them my entire life, I'm understandably motivated to point out this kind of hypocrisy as I run into very many liberals who claim to know better for my people while siding with groups who want murder before anything else.
edit: Also, I want to make it clear that the intent here isn't to single you out as an intentionally and irredeemably evil deceiver, but to (op advocated for genocide multiple times in their responses below, so I guess I can't in good conscience say that I'm able to expect them to learn from this; this person is just a fascist) is to demonstrate to you as well as other liberals how the worldview that you have been socialised to believe has primed you to adopt fascistic thinking even when you do not want to be a fascist. Liberalism and fascism are inextricably linked because they have the same ideological underpinnings of humanity's value and relationship with the material world. People who believe liberalism is inherently about democracy and acceptance, as they have been taught to believe, are not going to interrogate why that system has not produced an equal and benevolent society and therefore often conclude it is because it is not possible.
If we look at your profile more, we can see how deep this goes. Ecofascists tend to apply anti-natalism, and apathetic or doomer language to their futurities because it naturalizes the violence that is needed to maintain a capitalist, liberal system before it has happened while salvaging the perceived morality of its subscribers by constructing it as a result of the innate impurity of humanity rather than an imaginary future built from very specific values and assumptions. The kicker with your profile is the term “xenofeminist,” which draws specifically on technological posthumanism in its criticism of gender and heteronormativity. For those unaware, posthumanism is meant to effectively decenter humans (and therefore, settler-colonial norms that commodify the entire material world and all life in it) but more often reproduces liberal narratives where settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism are natural human behaviours and that humanity is unretrievable from that impure nature save for the intentional transformation of the species (I hope I don’t have to explain more how this easily results in eugenicist arguments).
What a petulantly hostile and delusional meta-narrative laden analysis.
I'm an anti-natalist because I think it is unjust to bring someone into existence inherently. No one consents to being born. The "soft" is mostly to do with the fact that under certain theoretical societal conditions and acknowledgment by parents that they owe an eternal unpayable debt to their child I can see it as at least a forgivable grey act that can maybe lead to more good things than bad things if handled with great care.
I myself wish I was not born. I love my mom, she's overall a good person for the most part, but shit... giving birth to me and my siblings was really fucked up of her.
I’m not an ecofascist. Ecofascism implies malthusian beliefs. Which is a collectivist idea: that individuals shouldn't be born to protect society. This not what I am and its clear that's what you prefer to see since you think in terms of naratives. I am an anti-natalist in order to protect the very individuals that would be born into existence itself. Greater societies can honestly get fucked if they rely on the suffering of individuals within them to exist. Societies and cultures themselves are not conscious entities, they are not morally equivalent to a person.
Also this re-occurring idea that I am "apathetic"... just fuck you. I am the way that I am because I have historically cared too much. And I’m fucking tired of caring. I still do and very much would like to stop caring but can’t. I'm in a mixed state of the anger stage and acceptance stage of grief. FUCK YOU.
A vacuum decay event would be an arguably humanitarian event. No more suffering. No more births. No more pain. No more inequity. No more petulant stupidity. Its not doomer to want an eternal peace for all.
Of course I "wish" for it with tongue planted firmly in cheek. I and many others already exist: the pandora's box is open. And a future where I and many others do not exist is a lovecraftian horror, but I am indeed doomed to it. We all are. One day no one you know will be alive. If we could all live forever in peace and pleasure of course I'd prefer that, but I'm not delusional enough to think that will happen. Maybe ripping off the bandaid would be for the best if it’d prevent more people being born.
So, you’ve managed to create a narrative that, while apparently attempting to challenge or criticize fascist ideals, subscribes heavily to fascist historical narratives where the suffering and even eradication of particular groups is inevitable and in service of a more prosperous future for all, liberal constructions and relationalities of the material world that ultimately views any world that isn’t beholden to human desires (including humanity as a species) as not one worth existing in, and explicitly discounts the death and suffering of racialized groups in the US that have historically been the targets of genocide for centuries.
Fascists believe in a mystic occult ideals that their race or ethnicity as well as their land are supernaturally important. Fascists do not give a shit about people living lives worth living. That is not compatible with your analysis.
All of this while removing yourself from any sense of responsibility, since you cannot change the entire system by your will, and are powerless over the trajectory of these political and cultural developments and attributing guilt to some other group of people who also do not wield substantial power in this system and who subscribe to political action rooted in the same sense of inevitability, except in service of abolishing liberalism instead of maintaining it
I don't really believe in free will. My blame of accelerationists is, if I take a lack of free will to an logical conclusion, simply a source of catharsis at this point. Me screaming into the void to feel something other than despair. Rage is preferable to despair.
So this "responsibility" talking point is intellectually a dead end for me.
But even if I did believe in free will and responsibility, in so far int those frameworks how am I responsible? I never choose to be born remember. I don’t owe you shit. You don’t owe me shit.
Are people born with an “original sin” of social responsibility?
A crucial element in liberal complicity with fascism as well as how many of them advocate for ecofascism is that learned helplessness that only views total, nearly baptismal change in a liberal system as the only goal worth struggling for. For many privileged liberals who are unused to fighting, the end of the world is preferable to struggling to achieve less than utopia. Whether you want to or not, you have apparently adopted fascism into your imagination of the future.
I would not describe my life as a privileged one. But if it is, than holy shit that just intensifies my belief that life is hell and I'm just in a slightly less firey part of it. That doesn't exactly inspire me to think I ought to advocate people suffer more for the small chance of a slightly less shit existence.
Again though, that's not fascism. Its really hard to believe you exist in the same reality as me when you keep describing these things as fascist. I'd say you aren't being good faith, but this post is too prolific for that. You are probably just lost in the sauce.
I don’t fit into whatever “accelerationis,” is supposed to be, so please skip that as a response (and do not feel the need to respond at all), but I am deeply troubled by the amount of liberals I see who are going full fascist because of their disillusionment with this system; as though that isn’t the strategy that Democrats have adopted. Since I actually am in groups that fascists target and have been targetted by them my entire life, I’m understandably motivated to point out this kind of hypocrisy as I run into very many liberals who claim to know better for my people while siding with groups who want murder before anything else.
If you think that it doesn't matter which party wins, what is your motivation to even bother with the voting discourse at all? Why do you fucking care?
I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to do apologia for non-voting in 2024? Are you trying to guilt trip me into fighting and dying? Which one?
I’d say you could really stick it to me by voting red but then I cannot invest emotionally in trying to change people’s minds on voting. Eventually, I’m just going to vote blue for self interest and general harm reduction and shut up about it. I’ve learned my lesson: I can’t change people’s minds and get them to vote, so I’ll stop wasting energy trying to do that. In that sense your side has won.
edit: Also, I want to make it clear that the intent here isn’t to single you out as an intentionally and irredeemably evil deceiver, but to demonstrate to you as well as other liberals how the worldview that you have been socialised to believe has primed you to adopt fascistic thinking even when you do not want to be a fascist. Liberalism and fascism are inextricably linked because they have the same ideological underpinnings of humanity’s value and relationship with the material world. People who believe liberalism is inherently about democracy and acceptance, as they have been taught to believe, are not going to interrogate why that system has not produced an equal and benevolent society and therefore often conclude it is because it is not possible.
Except what you’ve described and what I actually am is not fascism. Neither is of them are fascism. What you’ve described is a smug malthusian liberal, shitty but not fascism. What I actually am is more of a despairing consequentialist turned cynical bitter egoist trying to not go insane.
Now that you’ve tried analysis of me as as you have, let me try: Your entire belief system is seemingly structured like a fairy tale. A grand narrative to justify suffering and pain. Motivated reasoning more or less akin to what religious people engage with. You condemn people for not jumping into fight the torment nexus for fear of falling into it. You think individuals owe the collective something when its the other way around. You chastise people for not being sufficiently virtuous and self-sacrificing and for seeking a better life away from the bullshit.
Also, Xenofeminism is not on the the same wavelength as liberalism or liberal feminism. Liberal feminism is deontological in nature, obsessed with rights and duties. Liberal Feminism fits snuggly in capitalist realism.
Xenofeminism is closer to anarcho-feminism, but with the addition of hope for a technologically induced gender and sexual singularity of sorts and ontological anti-naturalism. The only area where I'm somewhat iffy on is its stance on alienation. It itself is "accelerationist" where as I'm more humanitarian.
What a fascinating comment. Liberal apathy, “it doesn’t matter, the violence is inevitable,” combined with some projected guilt onto a group of people not present in this post “accelerationists.”
You are clearly fascinated given the length of your response. However you are seeing in me what you want to see.
If you think consequentialism makes me a liberal you don't know what those words mean.
That said, I actually somewhat respect a long and thorough response, assuming its in good faith. I feel like what I’ve got here is somewhat of a mixed bag from you.
Could you explain how accepting that fascist Dems will enact this violence and making decisions that require that violence to happen to make sense does not qualify as “accelerationism” in the vague way it is applied here?
Because that's not what accelerationism is. Maybe you aren't an accelerationist, maybe you're just aligned with them or an apologist for them.
I normally wouldn’t comment on this because, honestly, it’s usually pointless for me, but this comment along with your profile provides a great example of how liberals subscribe to fascism. It’s worth noting that liberals historically get away with writing off “red states” because of the incredible wealth inequality between them (deserved in these narratives, of course, for their moral impurity of supporting the bad fascist party instead of the good fascist party despite everyone’s purported understanding that the Republican party is predatory and anti-democratic) and the disproportionate African American population there relative to many “blue states.”
This isn't fascism that you are describing. You are using the word to suit your purposes here. What you are describing is also not reality, liberals "write off" red states for many reasons. I'm going to avoid wasting my time listing them because I'm sure you are already aware of them and I am not a liberal. But also because "writing off" itself is a pretty broad thing and I'm not entirely sure in what way you are using the phrase.
Now, personally as an individual, I write off red states because they are full of petulantly stupid fucking people who hate me and people I love. I live in a fucking red state at the moment because I grew up here, I've lived all over the same shitty red state for almost 90% of my life and its absolutely filled to the brim with awful fucking people. And even in its blue/purple areas, (which I live at now) most of the people here are subconsciously tied to conservative social beliefs, even the good ones. I'm exhausted by it. I'm going to get the fuck out of this hell hole if it fucking kills me, largely because it already is killing me. I feel like I’ve wasted so many years trying to live here.
To prescribe “running” as a solution to genocide and socioeconomic disparity is, quite frankly, cruel; especially so if you consider how Native American and indigenous nations within US borders came to settle and survive where they are today. To suggest that the people who stay either to fight or live with their kin and land instead of run are absolutely powerless to defend themselves is about as clear of a settler-colonial imagination of history and human life that you can ask for.
People are not land. To connect land to people is far more fascistic in my mind. Borders are stupid.
If you live among people who refuse to flee with you, they are probably traditionalist or conservative. Afraid of change, that is their burden not burden of the person wanting to flee. The individual caught in a web of traditionalist native culture against a fascistic external machine owes neither party their loyalty, no one chooses to be born. Thus if anything, individuals are owed a debt for being brought into existence.
I do not owe these people to stay and fight. I'm not defined by the land I grew up on.
Wow, okay I was nice in the first message but this is actual straight up colonizer speak (edit real quick: and also an inadvertent confession, op stated that they grew up in a fascist culture but think of themself as too pure to have internalized values; the mistake that my comment is explicitly meant to teach about). "People are not land... people who refuse to flee with you, they are probably traditionalist or conservative." Literally, literally a fundamental element in Land Back and other decolonial movements focus on the relationship between people and land exactly because severing that relationship is colonialism and many indigenous nations not only in North America, but throughout the colonized world explicitly state the restoration of that relationship as crucial to reconciliation. Even more, to suggest that indigenous nations that fight to stay are somehow morally at fault and are conservatives in a liberal sense is fucking genocidal. Which makes sense since you also just said some insane shit like, "vacuum decay is a humanitarian event," like that doesn't mean you think colonized people deserve to die because humanity is too morally impure for your God or whatever.
So much of the rest of these responses are circular arguments that do not actually relate to the scholarly ideas you think you're engaging with. I take back what I said earlier, you actually aren't a good person, and you are a fascist. LIke every fascist, you refuse the label but accept the values. Won't be engaging with you again. (edit: I'd let go of Pandora too I guess, lol)
That is the consequence of what you've said here. As you were so apt to say, nobody owes anybody anything really, but people who adopt fascistic reasons not to make it so that any cooperation becomes a vector to cause even more harm; even if that harm is just them getting another chance to talk and spread their values. Fascists never want to accept the consequences of their actions because they feel wronged by them, hence the relationship between it, liberalism, and the decayed metropole. The world is wrong to refuse their will, no matter how self-destructive it is. And make no mistake, fascism is rooted in self-destruction in the same what that capitalism is, they'll kill themselves and everyone else before they accept the consequences of their violence. That isn't because they're stupid, crazy or exceptionally hateful (even while they are), but because they have accepted that the world cannot produce what they want without that violence. You see why I took note of the circularity of your beliefs? You did say you were from the core, didn't you?
Last lesson for real this time, you can take it or leave it.
You see why I took note of the circularity of your beliefs?
I don't relate to the individual you are describing if you are using that to describe what you think I believe. I'm not aiming to enact violence. I'm aiming to flee it and tell other's to try and avoid it. To seek safer spaces. On my selfish side I'm just trying to live the best life I can. One my moral philosophy side I'm advocating to minimize societally induced harm to every individual (if a tad over simplification).
Hell, this very critique you've produced could be levied at authoritarian leftists. Who'd enthusiastically agree that violence is necessary to achieve and maintain their goals and point at liberalism and insist they do the exact same thing.
You did say you were from the core, didn’t you?
While its made a difference I'm sure in making me who I am, this doesn't refute my points or beliefs.
Its all just a nationalist talking point, but "from the other side". Racial/ethnic animus as a political hammer. I don't respect it.
Last lesson for real this time, you can take it or leave it.
I will always "take it". But not in the way you might want me to.
"lesson" You have a high opinion of yourself.
I suppose I also do have a high opinion of myself in my own way, but unlike you I have a ravenous intellectual hunger for philosophical refutation of my own ideas that lemmy and for that matter most people refuse to give me. I legitimately am baffled why you don't tear apart my posts piece by piece despite your confidence in your own beliefs. I don't relate. I revel in chewing through everyone else's ideas. When I find beliefs that fundamentally challenge mine at a deep rational level, its a thing to be celebrated. Its a meal. When I run across someone who is just wrong, I also at least get the catharsis of raging at their stupidity and evil.
At this point I know you don't avoid my points because you lack energy to do so.
In you I see someone who may earnestly believe what they say but is afraid to consider things that might fracture or damage their existing beliefs. In order to refute my points, you have to actually consider them...
In a red state? At the very least for your own well being I'd advise taking refuge in a blue state. In the long run red states are going to be misery factories.
How's that incrementalism working out for you? 50 years of lesser evil baby steps has only resulted in a strong, solid march to the right and our current level of fascism.
Blue states don't give a flying fuck about people any more than red states. California has a bulletproof Democrat supermajority. They don't have livable wages, they don't have affordable housing, they don't have universal health care. They don't have affordable living. Any more than someone making minimum wage in Alabama.
What you just described is in fact how liberalism has responded to the popularity of its challengers; it's how it colonizes. Liberal historical narratives subscribe to progressivism, the idea that society is inevitably on a path toward equality, the end of scarcity, any "good" that is necessary to justify its existence. They disarmed African American Liberationist movements by adopting the Civil Rights Act and situating the deterimination and condemnation of racism within the legal framework of a fundamentally racist system, which turned out predictably. Jasbir Puar coined the term "homonationalism" to describe the specific kind of pro-imperialist queerness that emerged following the legal acceptance of queer property and marriage rights in a period of US military expansion into Iraq and Afghanistan. The AIDS genocide and subsequent necessity of establishing property rights for widowed spouses functioned similarly to disarm gender and marriage abolition movements within queer critiques of liberalism, which established a privileged class of queer people who promptly betrayed the rest of us for material comfort.
This isn't to say there was no value in these concessions -- obviously, we have to use whatever tool we have at our disposal including the incidental cooperation of the liberal state -- but that the consequences of these developments teaches us that this is an existential conflict. There is no world where a liberal state exists without genocidal violence and the longer it exists, the more violence it will execute.
This post seems to be implying voting for democrats is a bad idea. The alternative in a 2 party system is to vote for a republican, who would do absolutely worse by workers than this as governor or other representative. Also ignores the fact that the only reason this bill was on a desk to be vetoed is because democrats could even write the bill in the state chambers. If those chambers were just republicans, we’d be reading instead about a democratic governor vetoing a bill to allow child labor or a republican governor signing it into law. They are not the same party and everyone knows it. Yes the wealthy class has influence in the Democratic Party and yes that means that they’re not the ideal party that represents the people, but they’re also not what’s actively destroying the US at break neck speed.
K. Do you think we’re going to be doing anything productive under a Republican that bends the knee to the central party that in turn bends the knee to a single pedophile in charge lest they get primaried?
Nobody is saying “vote blue no matter who” but the Republican Party is rotten to the core. Right now we don’t have a lot of choices and you can’t swing the needle all at once.
K. Do you think we’re going to be doing anything productive under a Republican that bends the knee to the central party that in turn bends the knee to a single pedophile in charge lest they get primaried?
No. With republicans you have fast decline, with democrats slow decline. Extends that for several more decades and you will end with nothing to be saved.
I agree the two party system has to go. I want proportional representation. So I vote for the candidate in the elections I get to vote in that most represents my desire. That is never a Republican, and not voting doesn’t somehow magically make my dream of a socialist democracy occur.
LOL
Don't ever change americans.
And I mean that, you've worked yourself to the edge of the shithole fast (R) or less fast (D).
And clearly you deserve it since you have zero awareness and want to keep this idiotic game going.
You are a joke to the world.
Despite being substantially less bad than the US it certainly shouldn't be seen as an example.
As we are, like the rest of Europe a vassal state of your regime and are being dragged down with them and sacrificed solely for the benefit and imperialist aspirations of your regime.
The answer to your problems is very simple in theory and has been suggested here and in plenty other places.
Drop both sides of the uniparty.
From the expected reactions here it's clear that this is not going to happen.
americans are simply to propagandized and conditioned.
You can't help people that don't want to be helped.
While many ML patiently and thoroughly explain what needs to be done they refuse these answers.
I admire their persistence but I have lost the energy to keep on trying.
IMO you are no longer victims of your system when you continue to support that system and are de facto collaborators and complicit in their actions.
Then I would rather pragmatically see you destroy yourselves so you at least stop being the cancer of the world.
If Belgium shouldn’t be seen as an example, I have some additional follow-up.
How would you suggest to drop the two party system (or unitary, as you believe they’re the same; certainly the political class as a whole is aligned with the oligarchy in the US, and our class struggle is against that as a whole, but I think we disagree in that I find the real world effect of one party in America in particular is worse than the other), in real, practical steps? Do you reject those working toward that goal simply because they’re not there yet, or have a view of how to get there that doesn’t necessarily match yours? It seems if you truly want to effect change, you would support those who share the same end goal, and attempt to persuade them to your preferred way to accomplish that goal, and you, as it stands, should of course be executing your preferred manner.
Also, by the logic you seem to be using, if you still exist in your vassal state, then you must be de facto a collaborator and complicit in their actions. You are no longer a victim of the system that you are in part railing against. I think, then, you must pragmatically wish for your state to also destroy itself. If instead I’ve misunderstood and you’re interested in supporting the workers in their class struggle in real and practical ways, then we’re very much fighting the same fight for the same goal.
The fact that one faction of your uniparty is worse does not make one bit of difference when they both move in the same direction and one side is merely driving the car off the cliff at a slower speed.
Choosing that option instead inhibiting the very simple 3rd party solution is being complicit.
They are not part of "those working toward that goal", on the contrary.
I imagine the percentage of the striving towards a real left solution is a low single digit number.
Even then, I've seen multiple parties here, like real left, extreme right (unfortunately) or green grow from the same depressing numbers to big parties.
But americans have been incapable of even trying, and this for more than 2 centuries.
Now they're finally at the (pre)fascist state and even then their 'actions' are embarrassing, futile and ineffective.
Truly hopeless.
It's not my country so I am fine with seeing it collapse, as I said, there are but a few unfortunate collateral victims while it's a huge benefit for the world.
The second best solution.
And your logic is faulty in many ways.
I don't vote for our lesser evil parties so I am in no way complicit.
That is only the sell-out government and those supporting it.
And yes I wish for them to be gone, especially the EU.
Which will become a lot easier once the USSA and its cancerous influence stops.
The difference is Europeans actually do class struggle, unlike americans.
The many commenting here thinking they're leftists and choosing the lesser evil are nothing to support.
We are certainly not working for the same goal.
That's called a 2 party system. What you seem to wish for is an omniparty system, which in a dialectical anything with competition for electoral victory can't exist. And if you don't like this, you won't like a 1 party system, like in USSR (deceased) or China.
Ranked choice might help. I've noticed that support and distaste for that seem to be about similar between R and D supporters in English-speaking Web, but I live in Russia, so it's just my blabber.
Also the way it is now you have generally red and generally blue and mixed areas, while with ranked choice there might suddenly be raising friction in politics, which in turn might cause upheavals. And with the way everyone on the Web seems to like potential violence, probably not the best idea.
And I have thought in the past about all kinds of potential balanced systems, with pseudo-random choice of representatives, with balancing that and electoral and literally bought places, with various veto schemes, and it's possible to design a political system doing exactly what one wants, it's just that nobody is in power to make that and impose it upon others, and in rare situations where such a non-compromising new electoral system creation happens, it's something like Russian Civil War where the winning side designed a political system where you can technically (mathematically) have guaranteed victory with 3 levels of representation, 2% of votes and gerrymandering.
That's not very good. That illustrates how those having power to single-handedly change things are not usually those you'd want to.
If liberals spent more time punching right instead of left we wouldn't be were we are politically. But they know they have too much to lose by dismantling the status quo. The level of privilege you have by defending our common oppressors keeps you comfortable
Agreed usually Igor for me too but I've seen Ivan and Igor used so much here by specific accounts it's sadly be becoming interchangeable when on fediverse. Or honestly anything that is critical of democrats
The Republicans have demonstrated that no, these things do not take time.
I asked for a gender inclusive restroom, was gaslighted those things take time. I then emailed CEO cc’ed chair of board of directors. It was converted in 2 days.
It was never about time, it’s about agency
Yep, it takes time for us peons but the dictators can do anything they please.
Add long as you brazenly break rules and laws, and your controlling party willingly does nothing about it
Let's break some laws to make everyone better off.
No that would be terrorism put the bread down Mr valjean
The only law democrats are willing to break is the Leahy law.
but . . . but . . .but THE PARLIMENTARIAN said we need to keep slavery!
If America was a school we'd have one party full of bullies smoking in the bathroom who don't give a shit if one of their ranks breaks the rules so long as it's not messing with them personally, and we've got another party full of brown nosers who will run and tell the teacher any time someone even thinks about using the wrong kind of pencil. Neither is good for the student body as a whole, but in very different ways.
Lisa Simpson ass fucking "opposition".
And she's dating Nelson.
The teacher? John Roberts & co.
Why would they need to be in the bathroom?
The school is bought and paid for.
Gotta keep up the aesthetics.
I wish that the Democrats had anybody who was willing to fight for Medicare For All the same way Republicans fought to overturn Roe v. Wade.
I would like to think that Bernie Sanders is one of those people.
Republicans have a propaganda network back then to fight against Obamacare (which isn't even Medicare for all). It was really surprising how much the Republicans fought back given the zeitgeist was going the other way with Michael Moore and all that. The whole "death panel" stuff took the air out of the room and Republicans were going on non-stop about how it was the greatest injustice to all of America. It was wild.
Also, if you look at those that benefit from Obamacare and the fact that they're losing it. They still hate that it's associated at all with the Dems. It's weird.
Bernie isn't a Democrat, though.
Ah you're right, he caucuses with them and stuff but he's an independent, you're right.
Calling him a democrat gives democrats credit for his activism. Activism they fought against instead of fighting against fascism.
Burning things down is easy, building them up takes time
Then start burning what the republicans built or fuck off.
Burn down systems of oppression, then. Oh wait. That also magically takes time because this stupid platitude is just the latest in a long line of excuses from the pawl of the ratchet.
Excuses excuses.
Yes, Democrats like to whine that they only got 60 votes in the Senate for a short period during Obama's term. You want to know the last time Republicans had 60 votes in the Senate? 1911.
It's been over a century since Republicans had that kind of majority, and I think back then the filibuster had a larger threshold to overrule, so they probably didn't even have a filibuster-proof majority even then. You probably have to go back to Reconstruction to find Republicans with that kind of majority.
Do you know how Republicans dismantle programs without a filibuster-proof majority? They do it by cutting funding. They cut funding to programs and zero out their budgets. The program still exists in legislation; it just isn't funded.
To fix that damage does not require breaking a filibuster. It just requires properly funding those programs again. And funding can be passed with just a simple majority.
And of course, much of what Republicans do is done by executive order, and that can easily be reversed by the next Democratic president.
Republicans are a monolith and vote in lockstep. Democrats are an un-unified big tent party encompassing every ideology from identical to republicans to social democrats. If everybody that doesn't vote would vote for progressive candidates in every democratic primary and general we'd have a unified left of center party that could accomplish things. But instead of doing literally the only thing that can walk back the fascism all y'all keep working to get republicans elected.
What does that have to do with the conversation at hand?
If they truly get a majority to override the president, or in the future can then make the tri fecta again, it's easy to fix shit. Just make it what it was before, blast it through committees like the Republicans do with hardly a word from someone else. The question then is are Democrats incompetent or complicit.
Everyone knows they are complicit.
Breaking things is a lot faster than fixing them...
Particularly when you're not interested in fixing them.
Have you ever broken an arm? A window? A car? A heart?
Fixing things takes time.
That doesn't excuse not starting when given a chance. The focus should be on establishment Dems' failures to start fixing things, not on setting some unrealistic expectation that all it would take is a snap of the fingers and bippity boppity boo.
And until they start fixing things, "fixing things takes time" holds within it the implicit lie that they're trying.
You're right. That's only for netanyahu's every whim.
Netanyahu's whim isn't about fixing things, more like breaking everything in Gaza, Iran, and southern Lebanon.
If you really think Gaza can be rebuilt as fast as it's been destroyed, you're going to have some unpleasant surprises whenever the world can pull itself out of this death spiral and start caring about humanity again...
You're telling me that democrats break things and have no interest in fixing them.
What?
In the words of James Baldwin, how much time do you want for your progress?
Democrats tell you that fixing things takes time so that you eventually give up waiting. Incrementalism is a tool of fascism to prevent progress.
How much time? Ideally none. But the real world isn't idealistic, and breaking more shit because you can't have what you want right now is what petulant children do.
I'm not defending the establishment Dems' inaction, but I am cautioning against setting unrealistic expectations. Even if you vote out all the republicans and replace all the democrats with progressives, it will still take time to fix things.
And people's ignorance about this fact is a key part of the republican strategy that keeps getting them reelected every other election cycle. They always break shit on their way out, leaving a mess for their successors to clean up, and they blame it all on the democrats in office after them.
So promoting this idea that you can fix everything overnight is only helping the republicans.
No, incrementalism is a necessary reality. The reason it doesn't work is partly because the right people aren't in office to implement it, and partly because when the right people are in office they don't have enough time in office to implement it fully.
Get someone with the right intentions in office (a progressive), and give them enough time (at least two terms), with a congress that supports their agenda, and you'll see incrementalism work as it's intended.
Or you can complain that you can't have everything you want immediately, and attack anyone who doesn't give you everything you want right now, and when they never get into office for long enough with enough congressional support because nobody can pass your purity test, you'll have plenty to complain about when literally nothing good gets done because you categorically rejected the idea of incrementalism.
California has a bulletproof Democrat supermajority and does not have livable wages, universal healthcare, affordable housing, affordable COL. So the argument that Democrats need more time Is verifiably false
Did I ever claim establishment Dems are willing to put in the necessary changes to move progress forward? Because California Dems are about as establishment/corporatist as you can freaking get.
I never said "give establishment Dems another chance." I said "fixing things takes time," and that will still apply even if you oust all the establishment Dems and replace them with progressives.
Please take your strawman argument somewhere else if you're not going to actually read what I wrote and respond to that.
When Democrats do absolutely nothing to counter anything that Republicans do, they are complicit and are to blame for everything Republicans do.
Oh, please explain how it all works for us
They'll give Trump a golden parachute, wish him the best, then continue the ratchet effect. Neo-liberals are as much enemies of democracy as the reactionaries.
we must move forward and heal which is why we won't push for charges or do any investigations
Just like they did with the bushes and Nixon and Reagan
If you cannot blame racism you can blame Reagan.
Worse I'd say, they're less upfront about it
until they rehabilitate him in 10 years as the reasonable example, compared to Emperor Bloodvein Crusader.
See George W Bush . . .
He already has his golden parachute. He's been appointed the chair of "The Board of Peace" for the rest of his life.
Assume that Democrats win the next presidential election and enough seats in both the House and Senate to take meaningful actions.
Assume that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.
Assume that Trump doesn't die in office.
If all of the above come to pass, and Trump doesn't face real legal consequences for his actions, then it's another in the long line of flashing neon signs telling would-be dictators that America is up for grabs for whoever strikes first.
Only in amurica would they sell people on the right to be fired for no reason and call it "right to work"
Getting fired is right to work. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
They call trusting your ignorance "faith" and its something you absolutely need lol
The termination for any reason is at-will employment, aka "will to work". With that being said your point still stands because "right to work" is an anti union law that guarantees an employees right to refrain from being part of a union (lol). Both terms are dumb.
At-will employment and "right-to-work" are distinct ideas. The first has some real benefits, while the other is just union-busting bullshit.
At-Will Employment means that the relationship of employee to employer is technically voluntary. Your employer can fire you or lay you off for almost any reason or no reason, but you are likewise free to just walk away without even finishing your shift and get another job. (Non-discrimination laws and professional continuity-of-care rules are common exceptions.)
Right to work doesn't affect whether or not your employement relationship is voluntary. Instead, it means only and exclusively that you can freeload off the union, getting all of their benefits and leaving them with all of the expenses of negotiating your salary and work rules.
In the USA most (but not all) states are "at-will employment", and most red states have the same sort of bullshit anti-worker "right to work" laws that MLK was campaigning against when he was murdered. And, unfortunately, thanks to SCOTUS fuckery all of the USA is essentially "right to work" since the same assholes behind "corporations are people" and "money is speech" decided that payroll deductions for union dues are terrible in way that payroll deductions for taxes or insurance aren't.
The problem with at-will is the unequal relationship corporations and employees have. If I, as an employee, simply walk off the job, that hurts my chances of employment at other corporations. A company, however, will never see any consequence no matter how badly they treat employees.
Exactly. You can walk away and get evicted and starve vs. they can make you walk away and get evicted and starve… This is what constitutes fairness by modern democratic standards, apparently.
Understand that the precursor to at-will employment was that you walk away from your job and get arrested for breaking contract, and your family gets evicted without you able to earn money to pay for their food or shelter.
Like the other commenter says, it's extremely flawed but serves a purpose.
"There used to be something worse" is not the same as "the current thing is good"
Absolutely not, I agree.
But it's also kinda like Republicans saying they'll "repeal then replace" the ACA. You need the plan for the replacement beforehand, otherwise you just return to the old problems.
That's still the law under at will employment, if you sign a contract, you can't just quit anymore. We lost the protection of one year contracts, like you really think it's better for employers to be able to fire you with no warning than having one year contracts?? This all happened centuries ago of course
No one is saying that at-will isn’t also bad for workers, but it’s less bad than what came before it.
"Right to work" means you can't be required to join the union, but the union is still required to bargain for you without you contributing to it. Its designed to defund and kneecap organized labor. It has nothing to do with firing.
At will employment is what lets the employer fire at any time, and that is the law in 49 of the states.
Welcome to the age of bad faith laws! Because if they were honest, they couldn't lifestyle market conservatism to "people who like tradition".
Power is never given, it is taken.
I see a lot of discourse around this theory that when Democrats are in power they’ll reverse everything this regime has done. Yes this is a comforting thought but it’s way too much to expect from the Democratic Party as we know it now.
The Executive branch has been given (and has taken) an extreme amount of power to the point where the balance we once knew is now nonexistent. Does anyone think for one second the next president will just forfeit those gains? What incentive is there? And as we’ve seen and continue to see, who will hold them to account?
My bet is that we’ll see a few easy ‘gimme’ reversals that are enough to enable our slide back into the complacency we so desperately crave.
Republicans turn the wheel counter-clockwise while the Democrats don’t turn it.
The last time Democrats had a filibuster -proof legislative trifecta it was for 3 months and they passed Obamacare. When they don't have Republicans blocking them every step of the way, they actually do work to improve things. They aren't perfect by a long shot, but Democrats are the best of two options by far.
Obamacare was the implementation of a 1989 Heritage Foundation plan to implement an individual mandated health care system.
Also by no available metric did Obamacare "improve things". Healthcare costs rose significantly above the pre-ACA trend, bankruptcy increased, and health outcomes plummeted across nearly all metrics.
Didn't the ACA get rid of insurers denying coverage based on "pre-existing conditions"?
now they just deny coverage with AI generated reasons and force you to nag and beg for them to pay what they're obligated to. much better! and before that they just paid some corrupt physician to sit on staff and make up bullshit reasons to deny coverage.
Hey, they were already doing that as their policy well before AI started helping them reject covering things their policy holders need
Yeah I edited in the old method after I posted. Don't want them trying to blame this all on AI.
Yes but that was also a part of Romneycare, ie the heritage version implemented in MA under Romney being Governor
Sure, but you're assuming that "coverage" leads to better outcomes. I remember diabetes being one of the big ones at the time and is avery maneagble disease.
So, what was the hospitalization rate before and after? Did it decrease as was promised? Is diabetes unique or does this trend hold for the majority of those "pre-existing conditions"?
Wrong. The number of insured people went up. The uninsured rate dropped to a historic low of 7.7% by 2023. That is a tangible improvement in the lives of millions of Americans.
What good is insurance with a deductible I cannot afford to pay? Mandating people buy shitty insurance is not the win you think it is.
Just because you don't have insurance doesn't mean more people don't have insurance. Obamacare didn't create high insurance prices. That was happening no matter what. Also remember that Republicans tried to repeal the ACA more than 70 times and stripped several elements from the plan, so of course it isn't working as well as we would want.
I didn't question whether more had insurance. I questioned the quality and utility of the insurance they were forced to purchase by penalty of fine. One of the elements the republicans stripped was that fine, which existed entirely as a handout to insurance companies who swore up and down that having to cover preexisting conditions would bankrupt them unless you forced everyone to buy their "product". (Not that the republicans did it out of any altruism or anything, they just wanted to use that as part of a ploy to repeal the ACA entirely, which failed)
Republicans stripped the fine because that hurt the ACA. Insurance depends on healthy people paying in to cover the sick. The bigger the pool of insured, the lower the costs for everyone. This all falls apart if young, healthy people just chance it and skip having insurance. If you make people pay a fine even if they don't have insurance, this removes the incentive to skip getting insurance (which keeps prices down).
You are assuming that having insurance is correlated to physical or financial health and is therefore an improvement.
Rationally that makes sense, that's what it's supposed to do. Empirically the data shows an overall negative correlation between private healthcare rates and general healthcare outcomes.
It's true that the uninsured rate went from 17% pre-ACA(2010 when it was signed) to 10%(2016 2 years after it was implemented at an uninsured local minima) which is ~18 million people. However in that same timespan average annual health expenditures, for the entire US population, doubled from $1600 per person per year to $3200. Pre-ACA trend would've resulted in ~$2200.
That's a difference of ~4.87 trillion dollars stolen by "healthcare" corporations from individuals over the last 14 years.
The ACA would have passed much faster if they didn't try "working across the aisle" with the Republicans. If I remember, the original plan was to expand medicare to encompass more people who need it but negotiated to what Mitt Romney passed in his state while governor. Then the Republicans all voted against what they wanted. So the Democrats are either a paid opposition party or so absolutely naive to the dealings of Republicans and keep stepping on that rake. As well instead of making it a stepping stone they don't really talk about improving it either. Also in that time they could have enshrined abortion rights into law that is harder to overthrow than a supreme court ruling.
No matter how your parse things, the Democrats aren't good.
I agree, the Democrats aren't good, but they aren't actively evil like the Republicans. They are naive, idealistic, and out of touch, but they are the only party that (for the most part) practices democracy.
“Not good” isn’t better than “actively evil” if it consistently shows it does nothing to put itself between the evil and it’s victims, nor does anything to break down the systems of evil when it has the advantage. The modern Democrat politicians are not some newcomer on the political scene, they’ve had their ups and downs over the decades but even when the balance of power is in their favor they mete out “progress” at a minimum only when they have to, tell their constituents “that’s the best we can do”, then applaud themselves like they’ve changed the world. They are absolutely out of touch, not just with their voters, but with the fact MAGA is not the Republican Party of Reagan and Bush that was going to play political pendulum and trade power back and forth every couple of election cycles while having a gentleman’s agreement that bureaucracy and preservation of the system for the benefit of the elite is the goal.
If you don't think Democrats haven't been standing in the way of Republicans, you haven't been paying attention. Democrats blocked the SAVE act which would disenfranchise millions of American citizens, they just successfully blocked DHS funding over ICE, they just blocked $1 billion for Trump's stupid ballroom, they are blocking the Fair Tax act which would eliminate income tax and the IRS, HR 899 which would eliminate the Department of Education, HR722 which would define life at conception, HR28 which is an anti-trans sports bill, HR129 which would abolish the ATF, and on and on and on.
Why didn't Biden prosecute Trump for insurrection from Jan. 6th? He still believes you need a Republican party at all, like we need people further right than the Democrats. They could have prevented this entire situation by going after the organizers, of Trump stealing documents alone. But they slow walked us into this.
Nancy Pelosi - we need a strong Republican party
The Pandora box. Once an American president is truly held accountable. Every president can be held accountable.
Because the executive branch doesn't have the power to prosecute anyone. The legislature tried to impeach Trump over Jan6 but that was blocked by Republicans. The classified documents case was slow-walked by a Trump loyalist judge until he was reelected and became immune from prosecution. The law did go after the organizers and many were hauled only to be pardoned by Trump. Democrats did all the law allowed.
You and them are so out of touch with reality that you both think playing the old political game represents “standing in the way”. Blocking the SAVE act doesn’t do shit when your opponent is gerrymandering the maps in their favor. People will still be able to vote, they’ve just rigged the system so that who votes where will reliably favor them. And in places democrats control they’re playing the same game in their favor instead of fighting to eliminate the concept altogether. Blocking funding for the ballroom isn’t going to stop him from building it, it’s just going to force him to do it illegally, as he done with so many other projects, at which point they resort to grandstanding condemnation and strongly worded letters. They might have prevented abolishing the Department of Education but they have spent decades allowing it to become a tool in the dumbing down of America’s youth to the point it’s now run by a WWE exec, and frankly I’m not sure allowing it to exist in that condition is the better option. Blocking legislation that codifies anti-trans and life at conception beliefs is showmanship when you do nothing to stop the illegal enforcement of those beliefs by jackboots who deny access to healthcare. MAGA is running on action first, normalizing the violence and denial of rights illegally, then trying to make it the legal standard after and Democrats are acting like blocking the legislation somehow prevents what is currently happening from occurring.
Blocking ICE funding doesn’t block ICE. The goon squads weren’t pushed out of communities by press conferences and letters to the president. They were blocked and pushed out by citizens who put their safety and lives on the line, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, in defense of strangers. Meanwhile Democratic leaders postured for their next campaign run and took to trolling the regime on social media with witty memes. Your leaders have risked nothing and therefore achieve empty victories while the people they supposedly serve are arrested, beaten, disenfranchised, denied rights, dehumanized, raped, molested, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t give a fuck that what they’re doing is illegal because the legal system is in their hands and standing up to them requires more than saying “no” because they don’t respect personal boundaries. You literally have to block them with force equal to or greater than what they’re coming at you with, just ask Alex Periti.
Like I said, this isn’t the Regan or Bush regime that nominally had some sort of respect for the game of power trades, this is fascism. It’s going to walk over us all whether it has the legal justification and funding to do so or not.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
Following the law isn't "playing a political game". Giving Republicans an excuse to remove Democrats from power wouldn't help anyone. Did you even know that there are no more US deportees in Salvadoran prisons? That is because Democrats fought for their freedom. Those people were helped and that's not nothing. Real resistance isn't charging in guns blazing. It is showing up every day and saving who you can. Martyrs don't save anyone.
You're making the point for us. Obamacare is a 90s conservative proposal, it also completely killed the possibility of single payer healthcare for a generation. Republicans ratchet things right and then Democrats lock it in, great example you provided thank you.
Yup. And they did a switch to remove the public option, since they had an obvious ability with 60 votes. They had Lieberman play the rotating villain, and removed the public option so they could supposedly get GOP votes.
When they got no GOP votes, they passed it anyways, through reconciliation - but didn't put the public option back in. They literally chose to leave it out.
Not only a 90s conservative proposal, it was written by the Heritage Foundation. Democrats have never found legislation written by them that they didn't love.
So keep Republicans in power and ratchet that shit down from your couch? Put a clamp on your own balls, it's the smart thing to do.
Either way you get Republican legislation
So logically take the speed run? Ok I guess.
Yeah i guess two parties is a law of nature so we have to deal with it like we deal with thermodynamics
Obamacare was a compromise because single payer didn't have the votes. If you think single payer was happening at any point in the last generation, I have a bridge to sell you.
Obamacare was a compromise between sucking the insurance companies dicks and fondling their balls while you suck their dicks.
Hate it all you want, but millions of people have gotten healthcare they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. That's just an objective fact.
Those people always could have purchased health insurance. The difference after Obamacare was they would be penalized if they didn't. That's just an objective fact.
Obamacare subsidizes healthcare specifically for people who couldn't afford it before. The only people it penalized were rich people who refused to get healthcare. The fee was waived for most.
Compromising with Republicans/right leaning dems on anything is a clear sign of failure, not success.
Democracy is based on compromise. You can't always get exactly what you want. Sometimes getting a small improvement is better than stagnation.
Why do Democrats have to compromise with Republicans but Republicans never have to compromise with Democrats?
Why must they work with the party that has shifted towards fascism? Why must they compromise on half baked laws that don't do the things people wanted, but corporations got what they demanded?
Why do the Democrats work with fascists while refusing to stand up for the good of the country?
And then their sycophants will tell you that it's a normal thing to give the people who want to bring back American laws from the 1950s what they want, and you're a idealist fool if you think we should advocate for good laws.
The best to all of that is Democrats generally operate on good faith and Republicans don't. It is easy to hold your ground if you don't care who it hurts.
Funny that right wing policies never require compromise, something you state is essential.
If they didn't compromise, being gay or trans would be illegal, abortion would be banned nationally, and only white Christian men would vote.
Of course, the compromise is the republican solution from a decade earlier. What other choice did we have?
Romney may have signed it, but keep in mind Massachusetts is a blue state and the state Senate at that time had 35 Dem seats and only 5 Republican. It was a bipartisan bill, but mostly Democrat.
Continuing with the status quo would have left millions without health insurance, including many with pre-existing conditions who desperately needed it. It wasn't perfect, but it was an improvement.
It was written by the heritage foundation, it was the best way to maximize profits for the health insurance industry.
Yeah my life is so much better now that i have to pay a copay on top of my premiums instead of not having insurance and just having a regular old pay at the end of a visit. And Oh wow, I get a free flu shot and checkup once a year for my $5,000 a year in premiums. Oh and if i have a major health emergency i van declare bankruptcy on the $15000 deductible instead of declaring bankruptcy on the full cost of the surgery. Neat!
There's a reason republicans never repealed obamacare, because it makes the health insurance companies too much money.
It's really amazing how those people who only use ACA/Obamacare as a shinying accomplishment know absolutely nothing about it
The idea that Romneycare was written by the Heritage Foundation is a myth repeated based on the Michael Moore documentary Sicko. It's not true.
https://prospect.org/2014/01/03/no-obamacare-republican-proposal/
Let's say you didn't have insurance and were just counting on paying out of pocket. You are just living your life and BAM, you have a massive heart attack. Turns out you had an undiagnosed heart defect and there is nothing that could have prevented it or predicted it. You're taken by ambulance to the hospital where you have open heart surgery and where you stay for weeks to recover. You get a huge bill that you can't pay. What happens?
The doctors and nurses did a lot of work to keep you alive and they deserve to get paid. The hospital has to keep the lights on. You filing for bankruptcy doesn't change this. That is why everyone needs to have insurance. This kind of thing can happen to anyone at any time. As a society we can't just let people die if they can't afford treatment. Even if you take for-profit companies out of the equation, the whole system collapses with millions of people unable to pay.
That is why everyone has to pay premiums. Part of that payment is for vaccinations and check ups, but part of it is coverage in case catastrophic shit happens. Healthy people get the least back out of the system, but nobody knows if they will still be healthy tomorrow. The bigger the pool of healthy people paying into the system, the less each person needs to pay to cover the people whose luck ran out.
Which is why it's not an accomplishment for dems. Even with that brief super majority the best they could do is copy republicans plans. Which is also why the GOP can't make any legislation to replace it as it's already their plan.
Which then gets back to the point of the post
Edit, because people still don't understand they based it on Romneycare
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/romneycare-vs-obamacare-key-similarities-differences/
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/23/451200436/mitt-romney-finally-takes-credit-for-obamacare
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/apr/01/barack-obama/obama-says-heritage-foundation-source-health-excha/
That is so wrong it is astounding. If the ACA is the GOP plan, why did they try and repeal it over 70 times?
The Republican plan is for the poor to die because they believe in social eugenics.
It's literally Romneycare with a few minor tweaks.
They keep trying because they want to break the government and kill people.
And Romneycare was basically put together by Massachusetts Democrats. Romney just signed it.
When was the last time Republicans had a 60-vote majority in the Senate? Why do you need 60 votes to fix that which didn't take 60 votes to break?
The answer to that is literally 1925. That's how much the Democrats suck.
I don't know that Republicans have ever had a 60 vote majority in the Senate. You need 60 votes to make fundamental changes to the system that the opposition will not support. Things like constitutional amendments.
If you don't even know the vote threshold required for a constitutional amendment, maybe don't speculate on paths to political change...
I know you need 2/3. 60 votes isn't the cap. It still allows wide systemic change, but 2/3 makes it more durable.
Sure. But we need to come back to the original question. Why do Democrats need 60 votes to fix something that Republicans didn't need 60 votes to destroy?
Because it's always easier to destroy than to build. It takes months to build a house, but one can be torn down in a day. That's just life.
Then its time for a third option.
There is no third option until both a better option arises and one of the two existing parties is weakened enough to be supplanted. We aren't anywhere close on either front.
We do have a better option: it's called the Green Party. I do agree that the Democrats are nowhere near weak enough to be replaced, but that could change very rapidly depending upon how the next few years turn out.
The Green Party is not a realistic option. The best they have ever done is 2.7% of the popular vote for president and they have never held a single Senate or House seat. I think the more likely event is that the right splits into MAGA and America First parties, allowing a left supermajority that then splits into Progressive and a traditional Democrat parties.
...which is a lot more than any other leftist political party is doing. This is due to how difficult it is to get a party up and running, and then keep it running. Which we Greens have done for decades.
Plenty of people have thought they could do better, and where are those parties now?
It makes a lot more sense to join a party which has already done that hard work, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
There is a fly ramming against my window right now. That doesn't mean it is doing more than the other flies to knock my house down. No leftist party has come anywhere close to challenging Democrat power. All the third parties combined wouldn't even come close. Throwing a penny into a well and wishing for another party option would be just as effective as supporting the Greens.
Obamacare forced every American to purchase private health insurance. It wasn't a victory for anyone but United and Aetna.
It's funny because that is basically the same argument people used when Social Security was established. A functional society can't have people just dying in the street. It costs money to fix this, so it is not unreasonable to ask people to pay for it. Everyone needs healthcare eventually whether or not they are insured. People without insurance still get care which raises the prices for everyone who does have insurance. The more people who pay in, the cheaper coverage is for everyone. Making everyone be covered is simply making people pay for what they use. It's simple economics.
Yeah, I agree private insurance companies suck, but that's an entirely different problem, i.e.capitslism as a whole.
Social security doesn't force people to purchase a product from an independent, for profit company.
It's a simple gift to the insurance industry.
So then argue against a for-profit healthcare system. Don't get pissed at the government for trying to fix a problem.
I will always get pissed at a government that pretends to be fixing a problem by forcing me to buy a product from a for-profit company.
You can just pay the fee for not having insurance (which hasn't existed in 7 years) so you aren't forced to buy from a for-profit company anyway.
Must feel weird without the bot network that would upvote your kind of ignorant takes and overall shitty attitude that existed on reddit.
Your "debate style" is very reminiscent of a MAGAts. Maybe start listening and using that brain of yours to gain a wrinkle instead of constantly sticking to your dogma that has helped create the current situation in the U.S.
Democrats are fascists. Nazis did5 think they were the bad guys either
Thank you for proving my point :D
lol
Democrats are fascist
They bought into fascist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The fascist playbook has always been to divide the left with infighting so they can't provide a unified resistance. It has happened over and over again throughout history, but they can't put aside minor disagreements to fight a literal existential threat.
The Ratchet Effect.
Can you make this into a trolley problem or horseshoe diagram for us? Many people here can only think with that model.
This is part of what just erodes the hope out of me. We all know there are periods of regression and periods of progress, but whatever damage is caused by the regression period is
1- Caused much more quickly than any progress.
2- Is usually beneficial to the ruling class, thus they have less of an incentive to fix it.
3- Might just become normalized, at which point you're just starting from square one all over again.
Like, age/identity verification. We are in a period of mass and widespread regression right now and age verification is making progress, eroding freedom and privacy on the internet. Do you think that when we enter the period of progress, the age verification systems of today will just be reverted? Fuck no. They'll stay. They'll become normal. And the fight against them will need to start from scratch, with an ever bigger amount of opposition.
I'm really jealous of the people who can maintain hope.
On the hopeful side, socialism hasn’t had this many proponents since the 1910s-1940s. We’re making huge strides in overturning McCarthyist propaganda, and growing exponentially.
Didn't Biden undo a lot of shit that Trump has done during his first term?
Performatively he did, then reinstated most of what he dropped. Did nothing with his tax cuts for the rich, which checks out, as VP he worked directly with McConnel to muster votes to make the bush tax cuts for the rich permanent. He kept his border policies, war policies, etc. Continued to lie about the condition of the economy. Blue Fascism is a close relative of the red version
The one that sticks out to me as an example was Cuba. In the very last days of Trump’s first term, he put Cuba on the official list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. This is patently absurd claim that has no evidence to support it. At the time, it was largely seen just as a move to make things just a little bit difficult for Biden. There was no reason to do it other than make life harder for the people of Cuba.
When asked about whether Biden was going to take Cuba off the list, Jen Psaki basically said Biden has more important issues to get to. He never removed Cuba off the list like he could have with just a stroke of a pen. Instead of meaningfully engaging with Cuba to foster better relations - something Obama valued and pursued in his foreign policy - Biden just kept them on the list as well as all the other ways in which Trump tried to crank up the temperature on the people of Cuba. Now here we are on the verge of a potential invasion of Cuba.
The only reason that Obama tried any type of foreign relations with Cuba was to get ahold of their proven treatment for lung cancer. Once Cuba revealed that they were not giving that to the US, things fell apart.
His repeated platform was to raise the minimum wage.
So... here we are. Ds couldn't be bothered.
BoTh of our parties should be dismantled, our "labor party" is shit, just like our "limited government" party.
QUICK! DONT VOTE AND LET THE REGRESSIVE PARTY KEEP POWER! 🤣👍
Look at you talking as if there is no regressive party in the US
Literally the opposite of what I said, but cool. 👍
Right-to-work is just another bullshit anti-Union policy.
I have concluded that the Established Democrats would rather that Trump or somebody like him is POTUS than to concede to the Left on anything, even on a morally highly charged subject like the mass murdering of tens of thousand of children (in Gaza) which at least for some people would make the Democrat candidate so repugnant that they couldn't bring themselves to vote for her even "to stop Trump"
Had Kamala genuinelly conceded to the Left on some things and not latched on to none other than the Cheney familly (honestly, I don't thing the Israeli subject was by itself enough to cause that loss), she could very well have won, but that faction of the Democrats would rather loose than stop cozing with the hard-right, so they lost to none other than Trump.
If what the Democrat tribalists were parroting back them about how Trump was so horrible and the Democrats needed to win to stop his policies was indeed how the Established Democrats felt, they would NEVER had risked a Trump victory by adopting a Reject The Left strategy at all levels.
All this to say that these people will never undo what Trump did to the broader society (though the parts that make them less electable - i.e. that affect their own personal upsides - I'm sure they'll undo) because they're totally fine with it, as shown by how in the last election they would rather risk a second Trump presidency to keep on going Right politically than to pivot Left in the slightest of ways.
Without a Revolution inside the Democrat Party, the US will keep on going in the same direction as these Democrats will do nothing but talkie-talkie on reversing Trump's policies and then in a few years another Trump character (or, worse, a genuinelly intelligent one) get in power again.
I remember having this same conversation 20 years ago, except instead of Harris and Trump it was Kerry and Bush, and instead of Gaza it was Iraq. We didn't get somebody smarter than Bush, though, we got Trump.
Here's the thing. You don't need to be a smart president to do a lot of damage. You can have smart people in your cabinet. You also don't have to be very smart to break a ton of shit.
Then it's too bad that we have one party that loves that shit and one party that's willing to tolerate that shit as long as the minimum wage never rises again.
I'll give you that.
The "smarter" part is just something I threw in but which I did not really pondered on all that much.
In all fairness "nastiness" is the only thing which seem to have moved (upwards) consistently.
Spanberger is part of the paid opposition party. She will never do anything to take power away from capitol, and Republicans will do everything to give more power to capitol.
Spoiler: Democratic politicians wanted 80% of what Trump did. The 20% they didn't want was all him going after his democratic enemies ... but they take the bad with the "good".
Then why are the republicans spending all their time undoing democratic initiatives.
Because the orange kid-diddler got his feeling hurt by the black president and has been actively undoing anything possible
Because that's the game they play.
That is how the ratchet works. Republicans go insane when they take office and make cuts to everything except military spending, then dems get in and cut military spending ... then feel like a bit of a calm after the storm. Dems dont reverse anything Republicans did ... eventually Republicans get back in and around we go again.
Of course there are two parties. They create the illusion of choice necessary for the political ratchet - one party to drive things to the right, the other as controlled opposition to obstruct movement back to the left.
What's next, getting americans to believe their wrestling shows aren't real?
Conservative dems are just republicans.
I fear Dems will see just how easily we've bent over for the current administration, and realize they can get away with it too. I've said it ad nauseam -- when did we decide to start trusting the government? Any government? I'm right in the middle of my expected lifespan, and I never once trusted my government. Why would I? They've done nothing positive for my generation, and every slight success is quickly dismissed or disqualified by the next dipshit with deep enough pockets to rule the land. This isn't democracy, and it never has been. The "people's vote" has never mattered. It's just another smoke surrounded mirror providing the illusion that democracy exists. Hell, the only reason the word democracy probably exists in our history is to make us believe that such an impossibility is reality. Mark my words and those of others, the only difference between the two parties? One is full of fascist, pedophile, sex offenders and the other is full of fascist, pedophile, sex offenders. The female leaders in both parties are just enablers, otherwise they wouldn't put up with the shit and take to the streets. Same for our more diverse leaders. If they rock the boat too hard, they're out a paycheck and some sweet, sweet insider trading. The whole system is dead, and I fear revolution is the only answer to the madness. But we've become too complacent and docile to fight. We're too busy trying to make ends meet to have the necessary reserve energy to fight for rights which probably never truly mattered in the first place. Just stuff written down that **we're **advised to follow or face penalties. None of the people in power ever follow their own rules or the rules commanded by the people. When I say we are doomed to the point of extinction, I mean we are DOOMED. There's just no way for even the lamest human to find any reliability, accountability, or faith in governments that have outwardly shouted that they're not to be trusted and could give a shit about your life.
love the righteous anger but you gotta try to stay positive my bru
Sounds positive to me!
The next step wouldn't be abandoning democrats, it would be getting democrats in power, getting rid of the republicans (because they've provably turned into an enemy of the United States of America), and then creating an actual left party, and having the democrats become the new right wing.
For at least 5 minutes, I'd bet, we'd have a sane right wing.
This. We need to move the country to working for the people. The way you do this is by consistently voting for the best representative of the people. You don’t need to start by having the perfect option. If the most progressive candidate is a Democrat, even if they aren’t progressive, you vote them in. When the fascist consistently lose, then that democrat is the right wing which frees space for a more progressive candidate.
Leaping to a perfect candidate would be amazing. Taking steps in the right direction is still good and worth our energy.
Americans are fucked either way, and that's the crux of it. Both highly corrupt parties blowing smoke up their ass and they've all been socialized to regard third options as jokes, meanwhile the establishment is the real joke. There is no good solution, only shades of shit.
Right to work is great, they just use the term to justify awful laws.
Right should mean if you demand a job the government has to give you one instead of this forced labour version the yanks use.
Or we'll get another Kyrsten Sinema, who talked progressive talk then cashed out on billionaire lobbyist payouts.
I still say that POS needs to be sued into the ground as a lesson to the rest of them not to pull that kind of shady bullshit.
Or “let bygones be bygones”
Why change the system when there is so much money to be made...
Political corruption is now embedded so deeply into the American system.
Foreign nations buy politicians, rich buy policies. The supreme court are now an extension of the republican party and those free holidays sure do help also they have jobs for life.
The president could nuke every blue state in America and not commit a crime.
It's fucked, it's a platform for dictatorship and corruption and political funding and grift has exacerbated it. Of course a party that has languished in powerless opposition isn't going to give any of that up. Of course they won't stop themselves insider trading.
And the military, they pledge a meaningless oath and are too weak to put an end to a tyrannical system.
So, are you saying that both "Coca-Cola" and "Pepsi-Cola" are owned by "Big-Cola"?
I'm saying the Cheerios and Lucky Charms may be 2 different cereals but they are both owned by General Mills to serve the same purpose.
...but one of the is actually not as bad for you as the other.
If the alternative to those two is to abstain from eating, then you will need to find an alternative source of nutrition. Those are the only two options in the pantry because you literally do not have the option to go to the store or plant a garden.
In this metaphor, we are comparing politics to food and the comparison breaks down
Stripped of imagery and stated simply: the state that has a monopoly on violence is ensorcelled by the inheritors, takers and exploiters to limit our options but to consider those options as identical is irresponsible and foolish.
We should not be resigned to fatalism or apathy.
I would love to hear you try and define a neolib. I wonder if that would be more wrong than your take on the ACA.
Adding neo to liberal is redundant. Just the word liberal is enough and the ACA is garbage and they gave you empty threat of it being taken away so you would clutch onto it and defend it tooth and nail. They know the public fears losing the few table scraps that get thrown at them
You are just a walking example of horseshoe theory. I can't tell if you are a Republican who hates the ACA because it came from a black president, or you are a lefty ideologue who would rather live under fascism than cooperate with a Democrat. There is really no way to know since you regularly lie.
You have settled for legislation written by Republicans to protect profits and capitalism. Then they used infantile tactics to convince you that you might lose your table scraps If you don't defend it.
And since you were completely clueless, Democrats are fascist, they've enabled our current political conditions along with Republicans. Republicans crank the fascism to the right and Democrats prevented from slipping back
Not Republican written first of all. ACA was based on a Massachusetts program passed by a Democrat controlled state Congress.
All you've proven is you don't know the definition of fascism either.
And who do you think wrote Romneycare? The fucking Heritage Foundation. Democrats have never found legislation written by the HF that they didn't love.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/apr/01/barack-obama/obama-says-heritage-foundation-source-health-excha/
https://prospect.org/2014/01/03/no-obamacare-republican-proposal/
All they got from the Heritage Foundation was the idea of the individual mandate which is hardly an original idea as it is shared by nearly all healthcare policies of developed countries.
Objectively false. Democrats have been fighting Project 2025 tooth and nail.
Fighting so hard they pushed a candidate whose internal polling never showed they would beat trump. Fighting so hard they had no alternatives for it. BlueMAGA is as deranged as MAGA
I like that lady
You don't need a governor to sign a bill if it has enough support
Harris was barely left to Trump on a small amount of issues and on par with him with a very large amount. She and the party are first-term Trump Republicans
Democrats only pretend to care about those issues as a method of obtaining power.
Gretchen Whitener and Michelle Gresham are proof that you are wrong. But you want to critique democrats, not improve the conditions for citizens.
Delete my comment, keep the hug box safe from criticism. Oppress and silence people.
Your comment got deleted because you can't read the fucking rules.
2 examples out of thousands is not a flex. They answer to the same people that Republicans do and have enabled our current level of facism.
AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Katie Porter, Pramila Jayapal and the two examples I just mentioned. You're wrong.
This extreme left vision won't work if you only criticize democrats and it's giving space for MAGA to ruin the country. Why aren't they going.so hard against republicans as they do democrats? Where are the Gaza protests at trump rallies? This group is like a blue MAGA. Vibes, not victory or facts.
Can't call a spade a spade or my comments get deleted.
It doesn't matter anymore. The federal government is set to decay over the next decades. Eventually the federal government will lose a lot of economic leverage and blue states will just start doing shit on their own regardless of SCOTUS rulings. People in red states will get locked into a psuedo-feudal hellscape.
I'm getting out while I still can.
You accelerationists are getting what you wanted. Its just not going to result in what you thought.
Accelerations didnt want destruction, they want the system to meaningfully evolve in the most expedient, most peaceful, most Just way possible. We stand in opposition to the "things will naturally just fix themselves if you make sure to vote dem in the primaries" crowd. (And to be clear, the republicans are hopeless)
What you want is immaterial to effective strategy. Voting/not-voting for an ideal is not something you do in the US. If you want the ideal, you work off a lesser liberal enemy by electing them and then doing on the ground work to undermine or challenge them with proper alternatives.
Instead we have fascists in power and I have never been more anti-motivated. Not demotivated, anti-motivated. Spite fuels me now. I'm a miserable wraith of what could have been, and I blame you and people like you.
You've dragged me into the mud and now the only way out that I could emotionally tolerate is to kick it into your face as I get out of the puddle.
HalfSalesman, have you considered that being so disappointed with reality that you have adopted a deathcult mentality is in fact evidence that you do not have a strong enough relationship with reality as it is? As in, an idealist mentality that does not consider human desire or the material world? I know I said that I wouldn't respond further, it's just tough to see someone so obviously unwilling to just give up the ideology of their enemies. So, I'm not making this comment to warrant a response, but to ensure that you do realize those questions are able to be asked.
If my relationship with material reality is weak, your questions wont save me. For all I know you're not real shrugs.
I imagine that's not what you meant though. Maybe you are talking about axioms? Analysis structures?
People decided that Trump was the lesser of the two evil . It wouldn't happen without the lesser of the two evil bullshit rhetoric
Than those people definitely don't deserve my help.
Do you know what "First Past The Post" means?
The thing is that your own life is affected by their decision.
People just have to vote majoritarily to third parties. By accepting the two party system and the lesser of two evil bullshit you are switching between slow decline and fast decline each 1 or 2 elections. Why would any politcian listen to you if they know that yo u will keep voting for them?
My better pre-2024 self didn't view political salvation through lesser evil electoralism on its own. Its one component of a multipart strategy. An important part but not the only one.
Voting third party is a waste because its simply a bet on a completely unrealistic outcome. Its like having voter's collectively buying a lottery ticket, with the added risk of total financial ruin.
Further, the green party only pops up during general presidential elections. They then disappear off the map every other year. They aren't a serious political project at best and a engineered spoiler at worst.
But whatever, we're litigating something that legitimately no longer matters.
There is no multipart strategy. Just American switching between the two parties every 1 or 2 elections
Everything is unrealistic if people do not make effort
Bullshit. Greens no longer serve your political agenda so you stop caring about them and act like they are doing nothing when they are doing grassroot actions all over the year. While Harris only reappeared to sell her fucking stupid book.
What a fascinating comment. Liberal apathy, "it doesn't matter, the violence is inevitable," combined with some projected guilt onto a group of people not present in this post "accelerationists." Could you explain how accepting that fascist Dems will enact this violence and making decisions that require that violence to happen to make sense does not qualify as "accelerationism" in the vague way it is applied here?
I normally wouldn't comment on this because, honestly, it's usually pointless for me, but this comment along with your profile provides a great example of how liberals subscribe to fascism. It's worth noting that liberals historically get away with writing off "red states" because of the incredible wealth inequality between them (deserved in these narratives, of course, for their moral impurity of supporting the bad fascist party instead of the good fascist party despite everyone's purported understanding that the Republican party is predatory and anti-democratic) and the disproportionate African American population there relative to many "blue states." To prescribe "running" as a solution to genocide and socioeconomic disparity is, quite frankly, cruel; especially so if you consider how Native American and indigenous nations within US borders came to settle and survive where they are today. To suggest that the people who stay either to fight or live with their kin and land instead of run are absolutely powerless to defend themselves is about as clear of a settler-colonial imagination of history and human life that you can ask for. If we look at your profile more, we can see how deep this goes. Ecofascists tend to apply anti-natalism, and apathetic or doomer language to their futurities because it naturalizes the violence that is needed to maintain a capitalist, liberal system before it has happened while salvaging the perceived morality of its subscribers by constructing it as a result of the innate impurity of humanity rather than an imaginary future built from very specific values and assumptions. The kicker with your profile is the term "xenofeminist," which draws specifically on technological posthumanism in its criticism of gender and heteronormativity. For those unaware, posthumanism is meant to effectively decenter humans (and therefore, settler-colonial norms that commodify the entire material world and all life in it) but more often reproduces liberal narratives where settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism are natural human behaviours and that humanity is unretrievable from that impure nature save for the intentional transformation of the species (I hope I don't have to explain more how this easily results in eugenicist arguments). Many people who subscribe to it end up advocating for some immaterial, often technocratic solutionism. That you've combined that with some "soft" (unclear what you mean by that) anti-natalism, which ecofascists often use to once again construct humanity as the innate cause of capitalism's harm and legitimize genocide by an imagined necessity of "population control." All of that with some fun little death cult "vacuum decay" doomer talk. What a package here.
So, you've managed to create a narrative that, while apparently attempting to challenge or criticize fascist ideals, subscribes heavily to fascist historical narratives where the suffering and even eradication of particular groups is inevitable and in service of a more prosperous future for all, liberal constructions and relationalities of the material world that ultimately views any world that isn't beholden to human desires (including humanity as a species) as not one worth existing in, and explicitly discounts the death and suffering of racialized groups in the US that have historically been the targets of genocide for centuries. All of this while removing yourself from any sense of responsibility, since you cannot change the entire system by your will, and are powerless over the trajectory of these political and cultural developments and attributing guilt to some other group of people who also do not wield substantial power in this system and who subscribe to political action rooted in the same sense of inevitability, except in service of abolishing liberalism instead of maintaining it (assumingly, when you say that you hate "left or right" accelerationists and also want to forgive the people who didn't vote for Kamala Harris [how gracious] and view the election of Donald Trump as the cause of these events and not a symptom, it's difficult to believe you're talking about any other group than socialists or anarchists since fascists are inherently "accelerationist" ideologically). A crucial element in liberal complicity with fascism as well as how many of them advocate for ecofascism is that learned helplessness that only views total, nearly baptismal change in a liberal system as the only goal worth struggling for. For many privileged liberals who are unused to fighting, the end of the world is preferable to struggling to achieve less than utopia. Whether you want to or not, you have apparently adopted fascism into your imagination of the future.
I don't fit into whatever "accelerationis," is supposed to be, so please skip that as a response (and do not feel the need to respond at all), but I am deeply troubled by the amount of liberals I see who are going full fascist because of their disillusionment with this system; as though that isn't the strategy that Democrats have adopted. Since I actually am in groups that fascists target and have been targetted by them my entire life, I'm understandably motivated to point out this kind of hypocrisy as I run into very many liberals who claim to know better for my people while siding with groups who want murder before anything else.
edit: Also, I want to make it clear that the intent here
isn't to single you out as an intentionally and irredeemably evil deceiver, but to(op advocated for genocide multiple times in their responses below, so I guess I can't in good conscience say that I'm able to expect them to learn from this; this person is just a fascist) is to demonstrate to you as well as other liberals how the worldview that you have been socialised to believe has primed you to adopt fascistic thinking even when you do not want to be a fascist. Liberalism and fascism are inextricably linked because they have the same ideological underpinnings of humanity's value and relationship with the material world. People who believe liberalism is inherently about democracy and acceptance, as they have been taught to believe, are not going to interrogate why that system has not produced an equal and benevolent society and therefore often conclude it is because it is not possible.Part 2:
What a petulantly hostile and delusional meta-narrative laden analysis.
I'm an anti-natalist because I think it is unjust to bring someone into existence inherently. No one consents to being born. The "soft" is mostly to do with the fact that under certain theoretical societal conditions and acknowledgment by parents that they owe an eternal unpayable debt to their child I can see it as at least a forgivable grey act that can maybe lead to more good things than bad things if handled with great care.
I myself wish I was not born. I love my mom, she's overall a good person for the most part, but shit... giving birth to me and my siblings was really fucked up of her.
I’m not an ecofascist. Ecofascism implies malthusian beliefs. Which is a collectivist idea: that individuals shouldn't be born to protect society. This not what I am and its clear that's what you prefer to see since you think in terms of naratives. I am an anti-natalist in order to protect the very individuals that would be born into existence itself. Greater societies can honestly get fucked if they rely on the suffering of individuals within them to exist. Societies and cultures themselves are not conscious entities, they are not morally equivalent to a person.
Also this re-occurring idea that I am "apathetic"... just fuck you. I am the way that I am because I have historically cared too much. And I’m fucking tired of caring. I still do and very much would like to stop caring but can’t. I'm in a mixed state of the anger stage and acceptance stage of grief. FUCK YOU.
A vacuum decay event would be an arguably humanitarian event. No more suffering. No more births. No more pain. No more inequity. No more petulant stupidity. Its not doomer to want an eternal peace for all.
Of course I "wish" for it with tongue planted firmly in cheek. I and many others already exist: the pandora's box is open. And a future where I and many others do not exist is a lovecraftian horror, but I am indeed doomed to it. We all are. One day no one you know will be alive. If we could all live forever in peace and pleasure of course I'd prefer that, but I'm not delusional enough to think that will happen. Maybe ripping off the bandaid would be for the best if it’d prevent more people being born.
Fascists believe in a mystic occult ideals that their race or ethnicity as well as their land are supernaturally important. Fascists do not give a shit about people living lives worth living. That is not compatible with your analysis.
I don't really believe in free will. My blame of accelerationists is, if I take a lack of free will to an logical conclusion, simply a source of catharsis at this point. Me screaming into the void to feel something other than despair. Rage is preferable to despair.
So this "responsibility" talking point is intellectually a dead end for me.
But even if I did believe in free will and responsibility, in so far int those frameworks how am I responsible? I never choose to be born remember. I don’t owe you shit. You don’t owe me shit.
Are people born with an “original sin” of social responsibility?
I would not describe my life as a privileged one. But if it is, than holy shit that just intensifies my belief that life is hell and I'm just in a slightly less firey part of it. That doesn't exactly inspire me to think I ought to advocate people suffer more for the small chance of a slightly less shit existence.
Again though, that's not fascism. Its really hard to believe you exist in the same reality as me when you keep describing these things as fascist. I'd say you aren't being good faith, but this post is too prolific for that. You are probably just lost in the sauce.
If you think that it doesn't matter which party wins, what is your motivation to even bother with the voting discourse at all? Why do you fucking care?
I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to do apologia for non-voting in 2024? Are you trying to guilt trip me into fighting and dying? Which one?
I’d say you could really stick it to me by voting red but then I cannot invest emotionally in trying to change people’s minds on voting. Eventually, I’m just going to vote blue for self interest and general harm reduction and shut up about it. I’ve learned my lesson: I can’t change people’s minds and get them to vote, so I’ll stop wasting energy trying to do that. In that sense your side has won.
Except what you’ve described and what I actually am is not fascism. Neither is of them are fascism. What you’ve described is a smug malthusian liberal, shitty but not fascism. What I actually am is more of a despairing consequentialist turned cynical bitter egoist trying to not go insane.
Now that you’ve tried analysis of me as as you have, let me try: Your entire belief system is seemingly structured like a fairy tale. A grand narrative to justify suffering and pain. Motivated reasoning more or less akin to what religious people engage with. You condemn people for not jumping into fight the torment nexus for fear of falling into it. You think individuals owe the collective something when its the other way around. You chastise people for not being sufficiently virtuous and self-sacrificing and for seeking a better life away from the bullshit.
Also, Xenofeminism is not on the the same wavelength as liberalism or liberal feminism. Liberal feminism is deontological in nature, obsessed with rights and duties. Liberal Feminism fits snuggly in capitalist realism.
Xenofeminism is closer to anarcho-feminism, but with the addition of hope for a technologically induced gender and sexual singularity of sorts and ontological anti-naturalism. The only area where I'm somewhat iffy on is its stance on alienation. It itself is "accelerationist" where as I'm more humanitarian.
Split response due to character limits.
You are clearly fascinated given the length of your response. However you are seeing in me what you want to see.
If you think consequentialism makes me a liberal you don't know what those words mean.
That said, I actually somewhat respect a long and thorough response, assuming its in good faith. I feel like what I’ve got here is somewhat of a mixed bag from you.
Because that's not what accelerationism is. Maybe you aren't an accelerationist, maybe you're just aligned with them or an apologist for them.
This isn't fascism that you are describing. You are using the word to suit your purposes here. What you are describing is also not reality, liberals "write off" red states for many reasons. I'm going to avoid wasting my time listing them because I'm sure you are already aware of them and I am not a liberal. But also because "writing off" itself is a pretty broad thing and I'm not entirely sure in what way you are using the phrase.
Now, personally as an individual, I write off red states because they are full of petulantly stupid fucking people who hate me and people I love. I live in a fucking red state at the moment because I grew up here, I've lived all over the same shitty red state for almost 90% of my life and its absolutely filled to the brim with awful fucking people. And even in its blue/purple areas, (which I live at now) most of the people here are subconsciously tied to conservative social beliefs, even the good ones. I'm exhausted by it. I'm going to get the fuck out of this hell hole if it fucking kills me, largely because it already is killing me. I feel like I’ve wasted so many years trying to live here.
People are not land. To connect land to people is far more fascistic in my mind. Borders are stupid.
If you live among people who refuse to flee with you, they are probably traditionalist or conservative. Afraid of change, that is their burden not burden of the person wanting to flee. The individual caught in a web of traditionalist native culture against a fascistic external machine owes neither party their loyalty, no one chooses to be born. Thus if anything, individuals are owed a debt for being brought into existence.
I do not owe these people to stay and fight. I'm not defined by the land I grew up on.
Wow, okay I was nice in the first message but this is actual straight up colonizer speak (edit real quick: and also an inadvertent confession, op stated that they grew up in a fascist culture but think of themself as too pure to have internalized values; the mistake that my comment is explicitly meant to teach about). "People are not land... people who refuse to flee with you, they are probably traditionalist or conservative." Literally, literally a fundamental element in Land Back and other decolonial movements focus on the relationship between people and land exactly because severing that relationship is colonialism and many indigenous nations not only in North America, but throughout the colonized world explicitly state the restoration of that relationship as crucial to reconciliation. Even more, to suggest that indigenous nations that fight to stay are somehow morally at fault and are conservatives in a liberal sense is fucking genocidal. Which makes sense since you also just said some insane shit like, "vacuum decay is a humanitarian event," like that doesn't mean you think colonized people deserve to die because humanity is too morally impure for your God or whatever.
So much of the rest of these responses are circular arguments that do not actually relate to the scholarly ideas you think you're engaging with. I take back what I said earlier, you actually aren't a good person, and you are a fascist. LIke every fascist, you refuse the label but accept the values.
Won't be engaging with you again.(edit: I'd let go of Pandora too I guess, lol)So you want to dump your ideas onto me without rationally defending them. Doesn't seem like you engaged with me much at all in the first place.
That is the consequence of what you've said here. As you were so apt to say, nobody owes anybody anything really, but people who adopt fascistic reasons not to make it so that any cooperation becomes a vector to cause even more harm; even if that harm is just them getting another chance to talk and spread their values. Fascists never want to accept the consequences of their actions because they feel wronged by them, hence the relationship between it, liberalism, and the decayed metropole. The world is wrong to refuse their will, no matter how self-destructive it is. And make no mistake, fascism is rooted in self-destruction in the same what that capitalism is, they'll kill themselves and everyone else before they accept the consequences of their violence. That isn't because they're stupid, crazy or exceptionally hateful (even while they are), but because they have accepted that the world cannot produce what they want without that violence. You see why I took note of the circularity of your beliefs? You did say you were from the core, didn't you?
Last lesson for real this time, you can take it or leave it.
I don't relate to the individual you are describing if you are using that to describe what you think I believe. I'm not aiming to enact violence. I'm aiming to flee it and tell other's to try and avoid it. To seek safer spaces. On my selfish side I'm just trying to live the best life I can. One my moral philosophy side I'm advocating to minimize societally induced harm to every individual (if a tad over simplification).
Hell, this very critique you've produced could be levied at authoritarian leftists. Who'd enthusiastically agree that violence is necessary to achieve and maintain their goals and point at liberalism and insist they do the exact same thing.
While its made a difference I'm sure in making me who I am, this doesn't refute my points or beliefs.
Its all just a nationalist talking point, but "from the other side". Racial/ethnic animus as a political hammer. I don't respect it.
I will always "take it". But not in the way you might want me to.
"lesson" You have a high opinion of yourself.
I suppose I also do have a high opinion of myself in my own way, but unlike you I have a ravenous intellectual hunger for philosophical refutation of my own ideas that lemmy and for that matter most people refuse to give me. I legitimately am baffled why you don't tear apart my posts piece by piece despite your confidence in your own beliefs. I don't relate. I revel in chewing through everyone else's ideas. When I find beliefs that fundamentally challenge mine at a deep rational level, its a thing to be celebrated. Its a meal. When I run across someone who is just wrong, I also at least get the catharsis of raging at their stupidity and evil.
At this point I know you don't avoid my points because you lack energy to do so.
In you I see someone who may earnestly believe what they say but is afraid to consider things that might fracture or damage their existing beliefs. In order to refute my points, you have to actually consider them...
I'm staying, I was born here and I will die here.
You don't realize that the "acceleration" is international? Oh dear.
If it wasn't for Deutsch bank, Trump would have died in ignominy. The accelerators are global... you can't run away from Earth. Good luck!
In a red state? At the very least for your own well being I'd advise taking refuge in a blue state. In the long run red states are going to be misery factories.
How's that incrementalism working out for you? 50 years of lesser evil baby steps has only resulted in a strong, solid march to the right and our current level of fascism.
Blue states don't give a flying fuck about people any more than red states. California has a bulletproof Democrat supermajority. They don't have livable wages, they don't have affordable housing, they don't have universal health care. They don't have affordable living. Any more than someone making minimum wage in Alabama.
What you just described is in fact how liberalism has responded to the popularity of its challengers; it's how it colonizes. Liberal historical narratives subscribe to progressivism, the idea that society is inevitably on a path toward equality, the end of scarcity, any "good" that is necessary to justify its existence. They disarmed African American Liberationist movements by adopting the Civil Rights Act and situating the deterimination and condemnation of racism within the legal framework of a fundamentally racist system, which turned out predictably. Jasbir Puar coined the term "homonationalism" to describe the specific kind of pro-imperialist queerness that emerged following the legal acceptance of queer property and marriage rights in a period of US military expansion into Iraq and Afghanistan. The AIDS genocide and subsequent necessity of establishing property rights for widowed spouses functioned similarly to disarm gender and marriage abolition movements within queer critiques of liberalism, which established a privileged class of queer people who promptly betrayed the rest of us for material comfort.
This isn't to say there was no value in these concessions -- obviously, we have to use whatever tool we have at our disposal including the incidental cooperation of the liberal state -- but that the consequences of these developments teaches us that this is an existential conflict. There is no world where a liberal state exists without genocidal violence and the longer it exists, the more violence it will execute.
Not an incrementalist.
The worst of them are competent stewards of liberalism with social values to match. Just not socialist unfortunately.
The best of the red state governments are fascists who if they could would kill me.
This post seems to be implying voting for democrats is a bad idea. The alternative in a 2 party system is to vote for a republican, who would do absolutely worse by workers than this as governor or other representative. Also ignores the fact that the only reason this bill was on a desk to be vetoed is because democrats could even write the bill in the state chambers. If those chambers were just republicans, we’d be reading instead about a democratic governor vetoing a bill to allow child labor or a republican governor signing it into law. They are not the same party and everyone knows it. Yes the wealthy class has influence in the Democratic Party and yes that means that they’re not the ideal party that represents the people, but they’re also not what’s actively destroying the US at break neck speed.
The two party system have to go otherwise you will keep seeing both parties ruling each 1 or 2 elections and you will have more trump like president.
K. Do you think we’re going to be doing anything productive under a Republican that bends the knee to the central party that in turn bends the knee to a single pedophile in charge lest they get primaried?
Nobody is saying “vote blue no matter who” but the Republican Party is rotten to the core. Right now we don’t have a lot of choices and you can’t swing the needle all at once.
No. With republicans you have fast decline, with democrats slow decline. Extends that for several more decades and you will end with nothing to be saved.
Seems like you and I are having two different conversations. I’m talking about short term strategy and you’re talking about long term goals.
nothing pleases me more than watching the USSA decline
I agree the two party system has to go. I want proportional representation. So I vote for the candidate in the elections I get to vote in that most represents my desire. That is never a Republican, and not voting doesn’t somehow magically make my dream of a socialist democracy occur.
LOL
Don't ever change americans.
And I mean that, you've worked yourself to the edge of the shithole fast (R) or less fast (D).
And clearly you deserve it since you have zero awareness and want to keep this idiotic game going.
You are a joke to the world.
In which country do you reside?
Belgium
How would you recommend Americans move toward being more like Belgium?
Despite being substantially less bad than the US it certainly shouldn't be seen as an example.
As we are, like the rest of Europe a vassal state of your regime and are being dragged down with them and sacrificed solely for the benefit and imperialist aspirations of your regime.
The answer to your problems is very simple in theory and has been suggested here and in plenty other places.
Drop both sides of the uniparty.
From the expected reactions here it's clear that this is not going to happen.
americans are simply to propagandized and conditioned.
You can't help people that don't want to be helped.
While many ML patiently and thoroughly explain what needs to be done they refuse these answers.
I admire their persistence but I have lost the energy to keep on trying.
IMO you are no longer victims of your system when you continue to support that system and are de facto collaborators and complicit in their actions.
Then I would rather pragmatically see you destroy yourselves so you at least stop being the cancer of the world.
If Belgium shouldn’t be seen as an example, I have some additional follow-up.
How would you suggest to drop the two party system (or unitary, as you believe they’re the same; certainly the political class as a whole is aligned with the oligarchy in the US, and our class struggle is against that as a whole, but I think we disagree in that I find the real world effect of one party in America in particular is worse than the other), in real, practical steps? Do you reject those working toward that goal simply because they’re not there yet, or have a view of how to get there that doesn’t necessarily match yours? It seems if you truly want to effect change, you would support those who share the same end goal, and attempt to persuade them to your preferred way to accomplish that goal, and you, as it stands, should of course be executing your preferred manner.
Also, by the logic you seem to be using, if you still exist in your vassal state, then you must be de facto a collaborator and complicit in their actions. You are no longer a victim of the system that you are in part railing against. I think, then, you must pragmatically wish for your state to also destroy itself. If instead I’ve misunderstood and you’re interested in supporting the workers in their class struggle in real and practical ways, then we’re very much fighting the same fight for the same goal.
The fact that one faction of your uniparty is worse does not make one bit of difference when they both move in the same direction and one side is merely driving the car off the cliff at a slower speed.
Choosing that option instead inhibiting the very simple 3rd party solution is being complicit.
They are not part of "those working toward that goal", on the contrary.
I imagine the percentage of the striving towards a real left solution is a low single digit number.
Even then, I've seen multiple parties here, like real left, extreme right (unfortunately) or green grow from the same depressing numbers to big parties.
But americans have been incapable of even trying, and this for more than 2 centuries.
Now they're finally at the (pre)fascist state and even then their 'actions' are embarrassing, futile and ineffective.
Truly hopeless.
It's not my country so I am fine with seeing it collapse, as I said, there are but a few unfortunate collateral victims while it's a huge benefit for the world.
The second best solution.
And your logic is faulty in many ways.
I don't vote for our lesser evil parties so I am in no way complicit.
That is only the sell-out government and those supporting it.
And yes I wish for them to be gone, especially the EU.
Which will become a lot easier once the USSA and its cancerous influence stops.
The difference is Europeans actually do class struggle, unlike americans.
The many commenting here thinking they're leftists and choosing the lesser evil are nothing to support.
We are certainly not working for the same goal.
That's called a 2 party system. What you seem to wish for is an omniparty system, which in a dialectical anything with competition for electoral victory can't exist. And if you don't like this, you won't like a 1 party system, like in USSR (deceased) or China.
Ranked choice might help. I've noticed that support and distaste for that seem to be about similar between R and D supporters in English-speaking Web, but I live in Russia, so it's just my blabber.
Also the way it is now you have generally red and generally blue and mixed areas, while with ranked choice there might suddenly be raising friction in politics, which in turn might cause upheavals. And with the way everyone on the Web seems to like potential violence, probably not the best idea.
And I have thought in the past about all kinds of potential balanced systems, with pseudo-random choice of representatives, with balancing that and electoral and literally bought places, with various veto schemes, and it's possible to design a political system doing exactly what one wants, it's just that nobody is in power to make that and impose it upon others, and in rare situations where such a non-compromising new electoral system creation happens, it's something like Russian Civil War where the winning side designed a political system where you can technically (mathematically) have guaranteed victory with 3 levels of representation, 2% of votes and gerrymandering.
That's not very good. That illustrates how those having power to single-handedly change things are not usually those you'd want to.
Instead of acknowledging liberal complicity in our oppression you deflect to 1950s style 'Russia Russia Russia' hysteria
If liberals spent more time punching right instead of left we wouldn't be were we are politically. But they know they have too much to lose by dismantling the status quo. The level of privilege you have by defending our common oppressors keeps you comfortable
Is Igor a meme? ELI5 please.
They're being racist and calling the op Russian bot/agent for simply posting a description of what's currently happening in the usa
With another example https://lemmy.world/comment/23787088
Thanks, I'm used to Ivan as a slur for Russians
Igor evokes "hunchback mad scientist assistant" to me.
As in Marty Feldman from Young Frankenstein, but others as well
It's too obvious when Ivan is used.
Agreed usually Igor for me too but I've seen Ivan and Igor used so much here by specific accounts it's sadly be becoming interchangeable when on fediverse. Or honestly anything that is critical of democrats
No. Thank you, Renfield.