Correction: “I’m voting for Biden to make sure the things that are happening right now continue to get slowly better, instead of getting immediately and significantly worse.”
lol looking at the last couple weeks all I see is a crackdown on supposed “open society” in order to combat anti-zionism while the war machine rattles on abroad.
It’s more like saying global warming isn’t real because a new ice age just started. Biden is leading the greatest attack on civil liberty seen since the fucking Patriot Act, and his warmonger inclinations in Ukraine and Israel aren’t counterbalanced by fleeing from the fiefdom of Kabul, and if we take a broader look at how he’s handled policy, we see the continued escalation of the war on immigrants (not that he hasn’t pursued that lately too) and him basically shrugging at Roe being struck down.
The things that are happening right now are happening under biden though… why do you think it would get better when he has initiated the worsening?
I guess I should clarify that I’m not naive enough to think that this all started under Biden because history has inertia. Biden, having been VP before president and a Senator for many years before that certainly had an outsized contribution to the things that are happening now. The things that are in motion now are not going to be solved by Biden or Trump or really any of the entrenched political class in the west and pretending they are is just fooling yourself. They are too ideologically poisoned and are busy self destructing.
The choice ultimately comes down to Trump or Biden, it’s not a great set of choices, but RFK Jr isn’t any better than those two and he’s not going to get enough votes to win anyway. Jill Stein, Marianne Williamson, Cornel West, don’t have the numbers either. There aren’t viable candidates that can challenge the front runners at this point when we talk about the POTUS, so you vote for the least harm and try again next time while focusing on pushing Congress, state and local representatives further left.
You sure as shit don’t have the numbers for a revolution either.
The IRA act turbocharged private renewable energy investment. I saw multiple local projects that were already underway expand their scope immediately after the legislation was passed because the legislation made renewable energy far cheaper to build.
The new SAVE repayment plan for student loans allows families to pay significantly less on their student loans (I currently have a $0 payment with no interest gain on my 8k of student debt thanks to this plan, plus after 10 years of making my $0 payments any remaining balance will be forgiven)
Do you actually have anything to contribute to this conversation or are you just here to piss your pants because people you disagree with are making their voices heard?
That’s what they said back in '96 when I voted for Ralph Nader. Now we’re on the precipice of American democracy falling to fascism, if not now, then very likely in 2028. That doesn’t look to me anything like slowly getting better.
Some things have definitely improved in that time, e.g. the recognition of same-sex marriage, or the nascent resurgence of labor unions. Those things have been the result of slow, tough, hard work by the grassroots.
In that same time, though, the Democrats have been slowly helping to put the mechanisms of a fascist state in place, like the PATRIOT ACT, FISA, neutering the 4th Amendment, bolstering the Espionage Act, and setting up collaborative efforts between state police, Federal agencies, and the corporate sector to crush protest movements.
That said, the world is indeed shades of grey, and I voted for Biden in 2020 to stay fascism, if only for a little bit. It’s better to vote for the right-wing candidate versus the fascist candidate. I want to vote for him again, but there are some lines that must never be crossed, and I can’t in good conscience vote for a President enabling genocide. (The fact that both candidates do is madness.)
Maybe my calculus would be different if there were a reasonable chance that Democrats would do the things that are within their power to do to check the rise of fascism, but I have no confidence of that, as the track record shows otherwise.
Hey! So I know you are getting people being snarky and whatnot, but I have a legitimate question.
Could you address the question regarding how the Democrats are at least the party that are at least making slow progress, as opposed to not voting against the party that will turn the country into a Christian theocracy if given the chance?
Like I understand that you don’t like either candidate - neither do we - but realistically, we know the winner will be either a Republican or a Democrat. Why not support the one that at least won’t regress the country 500 years?
I’ve covered a lot of it in other replies, so to keep it brief by analogy: It’s like a survivor from a foundered ship clinging to a bit of flotsam (assuming there’s no chance of timely rescue) rather than swimming for land in the distance. The flotsam keeps him safe from drowning for the moment, but thirst or hypothermia will do him in within days at the outside. His only chance to survive long-term is to abandon it and set to swimming.
The Democrats in this analogy are the flotsam, if it wasn’t obvious. Bill Clinton got into office in 1992, after 12 years of Republican Presidents, and quickly made it clear that he represented the status quo, clinging-to-flotsam choice, rather than making things better. I believed that the long-term health of democracy required making the hard choice to swim for it. I wasn’t smart enough to predict the exact shape of the future back then, but here we are, on the edge of slipping below the waves. That’s the opposite outcome of making things better.
The Democrats don’t even understand the threat of right-wing populism, so they can’t counter it. (It’s not even clear that they would, if they did.) The way to save our democracy, therefore, is to fight for something better.
What is the plan to fight for something better? Like… I’m really not trying to be snarky, I swear, but voting for any party that is not R or D on election Day is never going to result in someone other than someone from one of those two parties being president. That just won’t happen. So unless there is an alternative path for change, I don’t see the point of voting for someone other than a democrat to at least mitigate the damage
There can be better. That’s the real kick in the teeth. Voting for President doesn’t have to be the biggest thing any of us do. I want to get Biden reelected because it gives us time. Time to carry that momentum into more significant, broader changes. Time to do better and do more and stop sitting on our collective hands for all the remaining days on the calendar.
Well, should everybody who lives in Alabama vote Republican, because there’s zero chance of anybody but a Republican winning? Do those people have a plan besides throwing their votes away? Or is voting about choosing the candidate that would represent your views, regardless of the odds of winning?
That would be great advice if we weren’t standing at the literal precipice of fascism. Fascism is a storm (pardon the unintentional pun towards QAnon) threatening to overtake us. If ever there was a time to suck it up and choose the “flotsam” to survive to fight another day, it’s now.
The Republicans, aka the Fascists, have a large and cohesive voting bloc, driven by propaganda and fear, that will vote for them just because they’re not Democrats, regardless of the fact that they are known criminals, grifters, and will vote for things that hurt them. This is not the time to divide into ideological factions and hope we make it.
It seemed to me back in the 1990’s that Republicans want to drive the car straight at the precipice at full speed, and Bill Clinton was content to simply lay off the accelerator and coast toward it. I’m not such a canny political analyst that I could predict the exact shape of the future back then, but here we are, at the precipice.
Do you unironically believe that life hasn’t gotten better for literally everyone that’s not a Rockefeller since 1924? I think you may have brain damage. Which is a much more treatable condition than it was in 1920 fucking 4.
Voting does not change the whims of the powerful. The powerful continue to push their will. Currently that will is massacres and genocide. Genocide Joe does have a nice ring to it. Vote or don’t. The powerful will get their way.
Voting is easy in my state, so I will. My current amusement is voting against incumbents. Preference is Third Party > Democrat > Republican.
Beyond the entertainment of voting: keep building mutual aid networks, be a good neighbor and use a pokeball if 2025 gets ghastly.
I agree that united we can push back. Creating horizontal power structures provide the push. Ideally, dismantling hierarchical power over merely scaring it.
Bro. Some elections are decided by 10s of votes. I live in a city of 12k people, on smaller elections less than a thousand people vote. By simply showing up you are effectively voting for 10-12 people. It takes like 10 minutes, and ballot measures alone make it worth while.
If you don’t vote you’re just accepting what those who did vote collectively voted for.
Hahaha you don’t vote to try to destabilize the system. You realize a large percentage of Americans never vote right? Not voting isn’t special at all !
I’m sure those women facing prosecution for seeking a medically necessary procedure will find great comfort in knowing about your destabilization efforts, as they endure their noble suffering in coming years.
Both. You can’t get what you want by only doing one or the other. If you don’t vote, you can’t pressure sane politicians that don’t get elected, and the insane fascists are just going to ignore you. And we all know that voting alone isn’t the solution
People need to stop acting like voting is the end all/be all, or that not voting/withholding your vote sends a message rather than let’s psychos who want to destroy democracy have their way.
They like to pretend like successful protests are a people’s moment, but protests don’t go anywhere without in-power support. MLK was establishment as fuck. The National Guard provided a replacement when his PA system failed at the million man march. You gotta make your opinions known by voicing them publicly and supporting candidates that are sympathetic to your cause. Even better, become part of the establishment yourself and be the helpful politician you wish you could vote for.
It seems to have been buried to the sands of time, but I once read an excellent article explaining why modern protest movements have a terrible track record compared to the ones from before the 1980s (or so). The book “If We Burn” by Vincent Bevins has a similar theme.
The long and short of it is that modern protests are too easy to organize, and don’t represent any real power. You can start a Facebook event and get loads of people to show up and stand in the street, but that’s pretty much it. In order to organize a protest in the 1960s, you had to have an established organization and power structure. You had to have regular meetings and a bureaucracy in order to get a large number of people to show up and protest. That same bureaucracy could also be used for other things, like supporting or opposing particular political candidates, and the oppositional and sympathetic establishment knew that.
A modern protest is toothless. It has no weight behind it. If you want to have enough power to take on the establishment that you oppose, you have to become equally structured and monied in order to fight them. That’s what it means to become a part of the establishment. You might not join the established teams, but you’re going to become so well organized and bureaucratic that angsty teams would immediately write you off as boring and just another part of the system if they ever had to participate in one of your long term planning sessions.
On an individual level my suggestion is to join the system and change it from within, because one person doesn’t make for a very powerful organization. Plus, it’s rare for any random person to have the chops or resources to build up a political organization for themselves. On the collective level, you gotta start holding committee meetings.
Correction: “I’m voting for Biden to make sure the things that are happening right now continue to get slowly better, instead of getting immediately and significantly worse.”
Can’t recall there being an active genocide going on with the full throated support of the US government when Biden got into office.
I think most reasonable accounts of the violence at the southern border (which has escalated again under Biden) would be considered a genocide
I mean there was it was just not noticed by liberals
when hasn’t the USG been supporting a genocide or three?
lol looking at the last couple weeks all I see is a crackdown on supposed “open society” in order to combat anti-zionism while the war machine rattles on abroad.
This is like claiming global warming isn’t real because it still snows sometimes.
It’s more like saying global warming isn’t real because a new ice age just started. Biden is leading the greatest attack on civil liberty seen since the fucking Patriot Act, and his warmonger inclinations in Ukraine and Israel aren’t counterbalanced by fleeing from the fiefdom of Kabul, and if we take a broader look at how he’s handled policy, we see the continued escalation of the war on immigrants (not that he hasn’t pursued that lately too) and him basically shrugging at Roe being struck down.
Look at that! Hexbearian whataboutism! Never seen that one before /s
Not whataboutism and also it is Biden sending cops to break peaceful protests so…
They edited their comment to something completely different.
Crazy, ya’ll tankies really will suck up anything that supports your worldview.
stabbing the blood back in
The things that are happening right now are happening under biden though… why do you think it would get better when he has initiated the worsening?
I guess I should clarify that I’m not naive enough to think that this all started under Biden because history has inertia. Biden, having been VP before president and a Senator for many years before that certainly had an outsized contribution to the things that are happening now. The things that are in motion now are not going to be solved by Biden or Trump or really any of the entrenched political class in the west and pretending they are is just fooling yourself. They are too ideologically poisoned and are busy self destructing.
Show these people a picture of border patrol on horseback whipping black migrants and 99% they’ll tell you it was under trump
There’s no way to hold their beliefs without being divorced from reality
This is potentially one of the greatest exaggerations of all time.
Please explore places other than your little conservative bubble, you might actually find the real world out there somewhere.
The choice ultimately comes down to Trump or Biden, it’s not a great set of choices, but RFK Jr isn’t any better than those two and he’s not going to get enough votes to win anyway. Jill Stein, Marianne Williamson, Cornel West, don’t have the numbers either. There aren’t viable candidates that can challenge the front runners at this point when we talk about the POTUS, so you vote for the least harm and try again next time while focusing on pushing Congress, state and local representatives further left.
You sure as shit don’t have the numbers for a revolution either.
So why hasn’t he made anything get better during the three years he’s been in office so far? If anything things have gotten worse.
The IRA act turbocharged private renewable energy investment. I saw multiple local projects that were already underway expand their scope immediately after the legislation was passed because the legislation made renewable energy far cheaper to build.
The new SAVE repayment plan for student loans allows families to pay significantly less on their student loans (I currently have a $0 payment with no interest gain on my 8k of student debt thanks to this plan, plus after 10 years of making my $0 payments any remaining balance will be forgiven)
Save 15% by switching your car insurance to geico
That…doesn’t seem to quite fit. We’re you by chance trying to reply to a different comment?
Sorry, your comment just reminded me of a geico commercial
That’s hilarious and of course it’s hexbear
Do you actually have anything to contribute to this conversation or are you just here to piss your pants because people you disagree with are making their voices heard?
Yeah we have a track record of being right, you can come to terms with it now or wait until the American flag punisher skull armbands come out.
Biden is slowly worse, Trump is quickly worse. Liberalism is not about moving leftward, it’s about continuing Capitalist hedgemony.
where’s that evergreen ratchet meme
That’s what they said back in '96 when I voted for Ralph Nader. Now we’re on the precipice of American democracy falling to fascism, if not now, then very likely in 2028. That doesn’t look to me anything like slowly getting better.
Some things have definitely improved in that time, e.g. the recognition of same-sex marriage, or the nascent resurgence of labor unions. Those things have been the result of slow, tough, hard work by the grassroots.
In that same time, though, the Democrats have been slowly helping to put the mechanisms of a fascist state in place, like the PATRIOT ACT, FISA, neutering the 4th Amendment, bolstering the Espionage Act, and setting up collaborative efforts between state police, Federal agencies, and the corporate sector to crush protest movements.
That said, the world is indeed shades of grey, and I voted for Biden in 2020 to stay fascism, if only for a little bit. It’s better to vote for the right-wing candidate versus the fascist candidate. I want to vote for him again, but there are some lines that must never be crossed, and I can’t in good conscience vote for a President enabling genocide. (The fact that both candidates do is madness.)
Maybe my calculus would be different if there were a reasonable chance that Democrats would do the things that are within their power to do to check the rise of fascism, but I have no confidence of that, as the track record shows otherwise.
Edit: Auto-correct damage.
Hey! So I know you are getting people being snarky and whatnot, but I have a legitimate question.
Could you address the question regarding how the Democrats are at least the party that are at least making slow progress, as opposed to not voting against the party that will turn the country into a Christian theocracy if given the chance?
Like I understand that you don’t like either candidate - neither do we - but realistically, we know the winner will be either a Republican or a Democrat. Why not support the one that at least won’t regress the country 500 years?
Because incrementalism is how we got to this situation in the first place.
Damn, you’re way more succinct than I am.
I’ve covered a lot of it in other replies, so to keep it brief by analogy: It’s like a survivor from a foundered ship clinging to a bit of flotsam (assuming there’s no chance of timely rescue) rather than swimming for land in the distance. The flotsam keeps him safe from drowning for the moment, but thirst or hypothermia will do him in within days at the outside. His only chance to survive long-term is to abandon it and set to swimming.
The Democrats in this analogy are the flotsam, if it wasn’t obvious. Bill Clinton got into office in 1992, after 12 years of Republican Presidents, and quickly made it clear that he represented the status quo, clinging-to-flotsam choice, rather than making things better. I believed that the long-term health of democracy required making the hard choice to swim for it. I wasn’t smart enough to predict the exact shape of the future back then, but here we are, on the edge of slipping below the waves. That’s the opposite outcome of making things better.
The Democrats don’t even understand the threat of right-wing populism, so they can’t counter it. (It’s not even clear that they would, if they did.) The way to save our democracy, therefore, is to fight for something better.
What is the plan to fight for something better? Like… I’m really not trying to be snarky, I swear, but voting for any party that is not R or D on election Day is never going to result in someone other than someone from one of those two parties being president. That just won’t happen. So unless there is an alternative path for change, I don’t see the point of voting for someone other than a democrat to at least mitigate the damage
There can be better. That’s the real kick in the teeth. Voting for President doesn’t have to be the biggest thing any of us do. I want to get Biden reelected because it gives us time. Time to carry that momentum into more significant, broader changes. Time to do better and do more and stop sitting on our collective hands for all the remaining days on the calendar.
Well, should everybody who lives in Alabama vote Republican, because there’s zero chance of anybody but a Republican winning? Do those people have a plan besides throwing their votes away? Or is voting about choosing the candidate that would represent your views, regardless of the odds of winning?
That would be great advice if we weren’t standing at the literal precipice of fascism. Fascism is a storm (pardon the unintentional pun towards QAnon) threatening to overtake us. If ever there was a time to suck it up and choose the “flotsam” to survive to fight another day, it’s now.
The Republicans, aka the Fascists, have a large and cohesive voting bloc, driven by propaganda and fear, that will vote for them just because they’re not Democrats, regardless of the fact that they are known criminals, grifters, and will vote for things that hurt them. This is not the time to divide into ideological factions and hope we make it.
It seemed to me back in the 1990’s that Republicans want to drive the car straight at the precipice at full speed, and Bill Clinton was content to simply lay off the accelerator and coast toward it. I’m not such a canny political analyst that I could predict the exact shape of the future back then, but here we are, at the precipice.
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Do you know who won '96? Maybe the edit added that though.
Can you clarify whether you’re talking about Clinton or Biden?
Where do they say they lived in Florida?
Lol things have not gotten slowly better through voting ever or have you somehow missed the last 100 years?
Their username can answer this question
It is a little too on the nose
Have you?
Well no, which is why I ain’t voting. Since it’s useless
This is literally the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard in my life, and that’s saying quite a lot.
You best not be in a swing state. We’ll anyway, if you aren’t going to be trying to improve things with the rest of us, shut up and get out of the way
Voting doesn’t improve anything. We’ve already said this
Then shut up and let the grown ups talk
No u
Do you unironically believe that life hasn’t gotten better for literally everyone that’s not a Rockefeller since 1924? I think you may have brain damage. Which is a much more treatable condition than it was in 1920 fucking 4.
Correlation is not causation Life has gotten better because of all the struggles outside of voting
Voting does not change the whims of the powerful. The powerful continue to push their will. Currently that will is massacres and genocide. Genocide Joe does have a nice ring to it. Vote or don’t. The powerful will get their way.
Voting is easy in my state, so I will. My current amusement is voting against incumbents. Preference is Third Party > Democrat > Republican.
Beyond the entertainment of voting: keep building mutual aid networks, be a good neighbor and use a pokeball if 2025 gets ghastly.
Well no the powerful won’t get their way if we unite and scare them into submission. Our societies have done this multiple times
I agree that united we can push back. Creating horizontal power structures provide the push. Ideally, dismantling hierarchical power over merely scaring it.
Bro. Some elections are decided by 10s of votes. I live in a city of 12k people, on smaller elections less than a thousand people vote. By simply showing up you are effectively voting for 10-12 people. It takes like 10 minutes, and ballot measures alone make it worth while.
If you don’t vote you’re just accepting what those who did vote collectively voted for.
I don’t accept shit. I oppose the whole system and I live my life in way meant to destabilize it.
Hahaha you don’t vote to try to destabilize the system. You realize a large percentage of Americans never vote right? Not voting isn’t special at all !
I’m sure those women facing prosecution for seeking a medically necessary procedure will find great comfort in knowing about your destabilization efforts, as they endure their noble suffering in coming years.
How has voting stopped that result, or the ongoing genocide again?
Already happened this year.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes won her position in 2022 with a lead of 280 votes.
Women in Arizona were 280 votes away from having their rights to privacy and medical care stripped.
End of segregation. Interracial marriage legalized. Voting rights for native americans. LGBT rights…
Nope, no progress there.
I seem to remember those things happening because of protest and struggle.
Elected officials only care about protests when they start losing votes.
Did those happen because people voted, or was it because of large-scale protests and pressure?
Both. You can’t get what you want by only doing one or the other. If you don’t vote, you can’t pressure sane politicians that don’t get elected, and the insane fascists are just going to ignore you. And we all know that voting alone isn’t the solution
People need to stop acting like voting is the end all/be all, or that not voting/withholding your vote sends a message rather than let’s psychos who want to destroy democracy have their way.
We have the largest protests since the Iraq War, and your “sane” politicians are telling us to fuck off.
They like to pretend like successful protests are a people’s moment, but protests don’t go anywhere without in-power support. MLK was establishment as fuck. The National Guard provided a replacement when his PA system failed at the million man march. You gotta make your opinions known by voicing them publicly and supporting candidates that are sympathetic to your cause. Even better, become part of the establishment yourself and be the helpful politician you wish you could vote for.
MLK was not establishment as fuck, most of his protests were illegal, and he regarded the “white moderate” who agree with his goals, but think things must be done slowly and within the system as just as great if not greater obstacle than the klansman.
It seems to have been buried to the sands of time, but I once read an excellent article explaining why modern protest movements have a terrible track record compared to the ones from before the 1980s (or so). The book “If We Burn” by Vincent Bevins has a similar theme.
The long and short of it is that modern protests are too easy to organize, and don’t represent any real power. You can start a Facebook event and get loads of people to show up and stand in the street, but that’s pretty much it. In order to organize a protest in the 1960s, you had to have an established organization and power structure. You had to have regular meetings and a bureaucracy in order to get a large number of people to show up and protest. That same bureaucracy could also be used for other things, like supporting or opposing particular political candidates, and the oppositional and sympathetic establishment knew that.
A modern protest is toothless. It has no weight behind it. If you want to have enough power to take on the establishment that you oppose, you have to become equally structured and monied in order to fight them. That’s what it means to become a part of the establishment. You might not join the established teams, but you’re going to become so well organized and bureaucratic that angsty teams would immediately write you off as boring and just another part of the system if they ever had to participate in one of your long term planning sessions.
On an individual level my suggestion is to join the system and change it from within, because one person doesn’t make for a very powerful organization. Plus, it’s rare for any random person to have the chops or resources to build up a political organization for themselves. On the collective level, you gotta start holding committee meetings.
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terrifying comment