Well, if it didn’t, then perhaps there’s no way to get them to do what we want and in that case it is imperative that they be replaced as soon as possible, a goal that is also furthered by voting third party.

The thing to fight for is ranked choice voting, or some other method without a spoiler effect. Until you have that

No. The thing is for candidates to endorse ranked choice voting and implement it, and until they do that, they are going to have to deal with the spoiler effect.

This shit is so stupid. “You have to fall in line unconditionally forever, until, out of the kindness of their hearts and against their own interests, the party decides to let you out of that situation.” That’s just saying we have to fall in line unconditionally forever. They’re never going to just give us systemic change, it’s designed this way on purpose and is working exactly the way they want it to.

The only way to actually apply pressure towards getting necessary policies is through setting conditions on your vote based on those policies. This ideology of “lesser-evilism” is completely illogical and incoherent, and the whole reason we’re here is because it’s such an egregious failure. There is no incentive for politicians to implement RCV if they know they’ll have your vote either way. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

I’ve considered it, but I might have to go back to school to get the qualifications. I’m also trans and nervous about what that future might look like.

And yeah, there’s also the issue of just training people to work for defense companies. At least you could maybe warn them? Tbh, if did go back to school for teaching, I feel like I’d want to teach history instead, it’s much more of a “study of everything” than physics is (and is more relevant to politics). Like tbh I kinda lost interest in physics after graduating, for me, it was tied to a lot of things that I’ve left behind.

I have a BS in physics that I never used, I chose it because I had no idea what I was doing and discovered afterward that most jobs involving physics are less “figuring out how stars work, for the joy of discovery” and more, “figuring out new and exciting ways to kill brown people, for profit,” which I did not sign up for. So, I’ve wound up doing grunt work at warehouses instead. “Learn to wash your own vegetables and you won’t have to pay court to kings,” as the story goes.

A lot of people go into STEM because they just want to solve problems and the issue with that is that if you just solve any problem that’s put in front of you without regard for who’s problem it is and whether solving it will actually make the world a better place, then you belong in the same category as the guy who developed the Blitzkrieg doctrine, who claimed afterwards that he didn’t really care about “politics” and was just doing his job as best as he could. Just because you’re capable of solving a problem and someone’s asking you to doesn’t mean that you actually should.

I know I’d be a lot cooler, especially around here, if I just put on the Che Guevara shirt and say revolution is the only answer.

Not what I said. Revolution is not the only mechanism for change that exists outside of voting, there are other forms of mass action such as strikes and protests.

Because every example of that sort of thing just leads to more fascism under a different name

That’s completely ahistorical. Even if you write off all the biggest and most famous examples, like the Russian, American, Chinese, and French revolutions (which you shouldn’t), the world is a big place and you wouldn’t be making that kind of sweeping generalization if you’d actually looked into it.

The reason people say this shit (aside from propaganda to discourage doing revolutions) is to signal that they themselves aren’t interested in participating in a revolution. But the actual history is a lot more complicated than is allowed by this sort of sweeping proclamation about every country in every time that has ever existed.

It’s funny because this position of “revolution is always bad” is literally to the right of neocons. Neoconservatives are always fantasizing about the people of rival countries (Iran, Cuba, China, etc) rising up to overthrow their governments. They’re allowed to be pro-revolution because they’re sufficiently wedded to the establishment that they don’t feel the need to disavow every revolutionary action ever to avoid suspicion, which allows these conservatives to be to take a position to the left of the average self-proclaimed anti-communist leftist who is desperate to make sure everyone knows they’re not one of those kinds of leftists.

But as for making it a red line for supporting democrats, sure. I mean honestly, credit to you for proposing something that might actually work. I think if there’s a big enough movement to do that, every Democrat would get behind it.

Yes, and the same is true for setting red lines on other issues, such as Palestine. If enough people actually stood by it, the Democrats would be forced to change their position, or they would end up being replaced by another party.

To be historically accurate, the catholic church only liked to kill its popes and other churches.

What the fuck is this shit. The church conducted brutal campaigns of terror hunting down religious minorities or those accused of heresy and tortured them to extract confessions which they then used to justify more torture. Jews were frequently criminalized and forced out of countries in mass deportations at their own expense. And then there were, oh yeah, the Crusades military campaigns that brought death and destruction even to their own lands as crusaders looted and pillaged wherever they went, in one case even sacking Constantinople who they were supposed to be protecting.

Like yeah I guess “Believe everything we say and defer to our authority and we probably won’t kill you” is technically better than just killing people, but that’s not exactly a high bar.

That being said, I am fully aware of the flaws in my ideology - and there are many - but I enjoy libertarianism because it allows me to tell people like you to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” and not feel morally wrong for it.

Lmao I’ve never seen someone so explicitly accept that they picked their ideology out at the supermarket.

See, ideas generally fall into two categories, which I call “manmade” and “natural.” “Manmade” ideas are ideas that are specifically crafted to have mass market appeal, to fulfill some psychological urge of some demographic, whereas “natural” ideas are just reflections of the world as it actually exists. Libertarianism is a perfect manmade ideology, it allows you to tell “the man” to fuck off, to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” Who cares if the ideology is actually correct or capable of producing a functioning system? All that matters is that it makes you feel good. It’s no different from people who believe in quack medicine or crystal healing or whatever, it’s “I want to believe.”

People just want to go down to the supermarket and look through all different brands of ideologies until they find the one that really suits their own personal style, and then they bring it home and put it up on the mantle and polish it every day and keep it there, they would never dream of actually using it because they might get dirt on it, and anyway it would probably break since it’s not designed for that, it’s just there to look pretty. A proper ideology should be used so often it’s kept in the toolshed, where it’s rough and worn and not pretty to look at, but it’s designed to actually get the job done, and that ideology should be just as suitable whether you’re a nuerodivergent trans software developer or a Guatemalan dirt farmer. Because the truth is the truth no matter who you are or what your style is.

If you recognize that you only like libertarianism because it makes you feel good to believe in it, then you need to reject it immediately. You don’t just go through live believing whatever makes you feel good regardless of reason or evidence… do you?

Supporting this, the Dems have literally funded far-right Republican candidates under a “pied piper” strategy, on the assumption that they’ll be easier to beat and to motivate voters to come out to stop them. Donald Trump himself benefited from this strategy, the Dem leadership loves Trump because he gets people so angry and they know they’re the only alternative.

Just a non-dictatator doing very non-dictatator things like stealing the election, operating secret extrajudicial torture dungeons where people are detained indefinitely without trial, illegally spying on innocent people en masse, and starting multiple wars of aggression.

I wonder how long it will take y’all to start rehabilitating Trump once he’s no longer the current thing.

The whole point of having extrajudicial torture dungeons is that they are extrajudicial. They may not have sent US citizens to them (although US citizens were killed in extrajudicial drone strikes), but the only “lawyers” they had access to at Guantanamo were people like Ron DeSantis who posed as a lawyer to try to extract information about which methods the victims found most unpleasant, to be shared with their torturers. If that sort of system exists, it can easily be turned against US citizens, as has happened.

Mass surveillance is a blatant violation of the constitution as well, and when the illegal programs were exposed, not only did no one involved in them get punished in any way, they kept doing them and the person who exposed them was hunted to the ends of the earth.

And meanwhile, immigration courts are basically kangaroo courts where young children can be made to defend themselves with no right to an attorney, and that’s been going on for a long time.

There hasn’t been anything close to rule of law in this country for a long time (if ever). Trump is just continuing the path we’ve been trending towards for a long time in a very overt and rapid way.

What’s “horrible” about it? It’s a very simple negotiating tactic that even a toddler can understand. The difference is that we aren’t throwing a fit because we didn’t get some toy we wanted or something, we’re throwing a fit because people are being murdered en masse before our eyes. If ever there was an appropriate time to throw a fit, that time is now.

Since our cause is correct and indisputably justified, the only thing that matters is whether the tactic is effective or not. And obviously it is effective, if the other side is being intransigent as they are, then “Do what we want, or else,” packs a lot more punch than “Do what we want, pretty please?”

Yeah if you think Bush was an acceptable choice and not a fascist then you don’t really have a leg to stand on with this “commies love gulags” nonsense. You think this El Salvador shit is new? Those of us who were paying attention know that Bush did the same shit, while they did their fair share of torturing alleged “terrorists” with no due process in our own black sites, the worst abuses were conducted in foreign countries like Egypt, when we sent prisoners there knowing full well how they’d be treated. Some of us have been fighting this battle for over 20 years, nice of you to finally wake up and notice now that someone you hate is doing it, but it would be nice if you’d notice when the people you like are doing it too.

It’s so stupid when liberals, defending a system with the largest prison population per capita in the world, with indefinite detention without trial, mass surveillance, etc, still try to take the moral high ground on that issue just because the word “gulag” sounds scary and foreign.

we root for the worst possible outcome

The meme is about voting third party, not Republican.

But yes, there have to be consequences to us not getting what we want. It’s a very simple concept.

This is just blind unconditional loyalty to the Democrats with extra steps.

If your plan is really to get voting reform done, then obviously the best strategy is to make support for a candidate conditional on them supporting it - because democrats do not always or even “usually” support it. Otherwise, there is zero incentive to implement it and a strong disincentive to do so - you won the election using the old rules, but if you change the rules, who knows?

You types are so silly about this issue. The very reason that we need RCV is the same reason we won’t get it. In the same way that FPTP blocks popular support for other progressive causes like “Don’t do genocide,” it also blocks causes like, “Implement RCV.” It’s like if my car won’t start and you tell me to just drive it to a mechanic. If we have some mechanism for implementing RCV, we should also just use that mechanism to get the other policies we want.

Your position would be more sensible and coherent if you were looking to achieve it through a mechanism outside of voting, but to insist on trying to use the tool you recognize as broken to repair itself is an absurdity, it’s completely irrational.

The only question worth discussing regarding voting is whether or not any conditions should be imposed on the democrats at all. If you say yes, then we can have a conversation of what those conditions should be, obviously, “supporting genocide” is unacceptable, but whether RCV should be a red line is another conversation. But if you say no, then your position on RCV is completely irrelevant, you’ll get it if the democrats say you do and won’t if they say you don’t and nothing about your behavior will change either way. It’s pure fantasy at that point, your support for RCV exists purely within your own mind and has no influence or effect on anything that happens in the world, you might as well be trying to wish a pony into being.

Good. Since we’re the deciding factor, we have increased influence and more negotiating power going forward. Now the democrats (whose slogan is also “No rights!”) might actually listen to our demands next time if they don’t want to eat shit again.

And if they still won’t, then it’s obviously necessary to replace them and that has to start somewhere.

Hope you get banned harder next time 👍

This is the same as saying that we can’t say animals want to avoid pain unless we can prove that they’re capable of conceptualizing pain in the abstract, it’s spurious bullshit.

Debate pervertry. Hiding your beliefs and only caring about your rhetorical positioning.

Survival instincts are incredibly well documented and proven beyond a doubt, you are completely wrong.

if you can start affecting a congenial tone.

Fuck no. Absolutely fucking not.