While Education and Organizing is building the parts for a new engine the rest of the year.
Reminder that someone online arguing that you shouldn’t vote for Biden because of whatever pet grievance is either a Russian agent or an idiot playing into their hands
“Pet grievance” is one of my new favorite euphemisms for genocide.
Voting does nothing other than reform the capitalist regime. It doesn’t matter whether this cycle’s presidential figurehead is blue or red. Give it a few decades and you’ll see how the US will still be sowing death and destruction across the world, as it always has. The presidential race that liberals get so rabid about is nothing more than kabuki theater.
Ah yes, the bearer of truth right here, fellas. So your plan is do nothing, but bitch about everything. Gotcha.
Read some Marx and you’ll understand that political action doesn’t start, and end, at the ballot box.
look, I can understand the argument that you must vote for the most effective way to contain an evil. It’s a good solid argument.
However it starts taking damage almost immediately when:
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The plan to fight the evil is using the most disliked president in recent history to win a popularity contest.
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They pre-emptively destroy any and all opportunities to find a better candidate to win the popularity contest against the evil.
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They refuse to debate anybody just like the evil they want to defeat. Making it impossible to verify they’re the one for the job.
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They forcibly re-schedule the primary schedule to delay any signs that this plan might be a terrible idea.
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Their age is seriously in question, their mental acuity is in question, and they also decide to dodge being in a completely unscripted environment for two hours while standing.
Certainly with all this you can at least understand why someone would rather vote third party, because this Biden option is not making me feel any safer.
At what point can we stop pointing the finger at the voters and start pointing at the guy they’re “supposed to vote for”? Is there a point we can ever point that finger at Biden? Or is it like Trump,where we need to vote for him “even if he were to shoot someone in the street”?
Is there a point we can ever point that finger at Biden?
Point fingers all you want as long as you vote to keep the rapist, insurrectionist, self-admitted wannabe dictator out of power.
It works better when you have an idea of what the President actually does and what direct action would mean.
Almost everything we would want to do is at the local or regional level. Want higher density housing? Your mayor and city council control that with no say from the President. Better public transportation? Same, though the President can try convincing Congress to pass grant funding for it. More and better bike lanes? Same thing. Get rid of anti-homeless architecture? All city level stuff.
School lunch programs? State government can stop it if the wrong people are there. Expand Medicare? Same. Better rail networks? Same. Ban gay conversion therapy? All state government.
Foreign policy is the one thing where the President does have a lot of control. That’s actually the exception. I like Biden’s approach on Ukraine–getting most of Europe to go along with sanctions at all, especially after Trump destroyed our soft diplomatic power, was amazing. His approach on the Gaza conflict is far less amazing, to put it mildly. Other than foreign policy, the position is mostly advocacy and horse trading around funding priorities with Congress. Soft power for the most part.
A bad President, especially combined with a bad Congress, sure as hell can stop the local agenda items, though. Pull the grants for cities to implement public transit. Pull Medicare expansion entirely. Don’t provide school lunch program funding at all. Put judges in power who rule arbitrarily in favor of conservatives with no care for precedent.
What voting for Biden is for is to make sure the federal government doesn’t overrule things built locally and regionally. That’s it. The rest needs direct action on the part of all of us at different levels of government.
A bad President, especially combined with a bad Congress, sure as hell can stop the local agenda items, though. Pull the grants for cities to implement public transit. Pull Medicare expansion entirely. Don’t provide school lunch program funding at all. Put judges in power who rule arbitrarily in favor of conservatives with no care for precedent.
What voting for Biden is for is to make sure the federal government doesn’t overrule things built locally and regionally. That’s it. The rest needs direct action on the part of all of us at different levels of government.
finally somebody gets it dude hoo lee I feel like I’ve been wearing the nightmare vision goggles and taking the crazy pills or something
Reminder that not everyone who disagrees with your guilt tripping self righteous nonsense is a Russian bot. Some of us actually use critical thinking and can see a pattern that must be broken.
I’ve been called a Trumper/Russian bot/Chinese bot since 2016 (on Reddit, same username) because I’m critical of ALL politicians. I got banned from /r/politics for listing reasons why Hillary would lose and what she needed to change in order to beat Trump. Welp…
Did you think people in the Hilary campaign would be trawling through r/politics, looking for your comment and changing their platform to what you wanted?
Or were you just encouraging voters not to participate in the election?
You don’t have to if you live in a state that will vote overwhelmingly democrat. Maryland, California, New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and DC Biden won by over 20% margin I have wiggle room to vote 3rd party.
How many other people are thinking that same thing?
There is NO wiggle room this election. Not even in blue af California.
Save your principles for the local elections if you want future elections.
Haha every election is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER NO WIGGLE ROOM.
This election is equally important, or equally unimportant as any other election.
In Maryland there is like 33% wiggle room I am ok. If I was in Pennsylvania it would be a different story.
Hillary and Biden both beat Trump by huge numbers in Maryland I can vote for 3rd party no issues. People are just scared that people from Pennsylvania have the same idea which it would actually cause harm.
Maryland:
Hillary beat Trump 60 - 33%
Biden beat Trump 65 - 33%
I would argue that the folks who voted 3rd party in 2016 decided we needed to do more than just not vote for Trump in 2020. The folks who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 are gonna vote for him again in 2024.
I’d say equally this year it is worthwhile to do more than just “not vote for Trump” but vote for Biden (especially if you intended to vote 3rd party … but by all means vote your conscience first!) to further cement the statement that we did not choose Trump.
The stats show he lost no ground, the issue will be how much ground Biden has lost because of the attacks about their age and pushing folks to vote 3rd party or whatever as an act of protest.
Vote your conscience first, but don’t protest by a third party vote. If you have no good option CHOOSE HARM REDUCTION ALWAYS
I say this as a Bernie 2016 / 2020 voter. It still hurts. I’m choosing to reduce the harm regardless.
Hillary and Biden both beat Trump by huge numbers in Maryland I can vote for 3rd party no issues. People are just scared that people from Pennsylvania have the same idea which it would actually cause harm.
If people think an “evangelical” is going to handle the conflict in Gaza on the side of the Palestinians better than Joe Brandon they are sorely mistaken and/or misguided. 45 wanted a straight up Muslim ban ffs.
And how quick all these Hamas and Houthi cheerleaders forgot Ukraine too. A country that would not exist anymore if Trump had won 2020.
Evangelicals want this conflict, because in order for Jesus to come back and rapture them, the mosque on the Temple Mount must be destroyed so the temple can be rebuilt, which is step one of their prophecy. That’s the real reason they pretend to care about the Jews.
They truly believe this is their end times, and worse, a few years ago their perfect red cow they’ve been waiting for these thousands of years was certified; if that cow dies before they get the chance to sacrifice it to rebuild their temple, they may have to wait another thousand years.
It’s a death cult and they’ll kill us all.
Yeah? Like our devotion to repeatedly voting in neolibs like Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden has had nothing to do with tilting the political spectrum to the far right?
I’ll probably pull the lever for Biden, but I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t. Based on the results of recent decades of leftists holding their noses to vote for the neolib, even if Biden wins something much worse than Trump will arrive just in time for the 2028 cycle.
What if I think people should still vote but they should be ready to be unhappy with the outcome either way and that it won’t actually provide meaningful change?
Is abortion being nationally illegal “meaningful change”? Explain how that’s not meaningful for us stupid people.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. Meaningful positive change. Our government is great at fucking shit up.
I will be very different levels of unhappy with a too moderate democrat than a wannabe dictator.
So long as we have “too moderate democrats”, the wannabe dictators are gonna look great for actually believing in something. Fuck Biden for appeasing and therefore empowering the right, shifting goalposts back decades- I hope he suffers excruiating back pain today and forever if not ruinous guilt. He makes the democrats look SO bad. Especially on a international scale.
Then I’d understand and mourn your cynicism, but not think of you as a bad citizen.
Damn. I don’t particularly like being a citizen of anywhere, let alone a good one.
And soon those farms are going to be powered by ChatGPT. When you hear that Russian line it’s going to have ten replies all agreeing and giving supporting arguments.
I wonder if we’ll be able to spot hallucinations in such a simple task.
Didn’t she win the popular vote?
This is just shit libs blaming the left instead of taking responsibility for running a shit candidate with so much baggage that she lost while “winning”
If you want to be mad at anyone, blame the dnc.
Don’t you see the contradiction in “she won the popular vote” and “she was a shit candidate”?
It’s kinda like the contradiction that Bernie could win the general election, but 12% of his voters defecting to Trump wasn’t enough to make a difference.
Leftists are going to be shouting “the DNC is corrupt” on the gallows after Trump wins.
“Leftists are going to be shouting “the DNC is corrupt” on the gallows after Trump wins.”
This is the stupid shit is see all over lemmy that makes me so mad… Yes the DNC SUCKS but guess what? They’re the status quo right now, and the alternative is literally a fucking dictatorship that has vindictive actions as their highest priority.
There aren’t even dog whistles anymore, he’s using the word dictator… But yeah BomberBiden… Mr.Genocide… I get it… So that means let Trump win? Seriously?
TF do you think our vote was? I can’t vote any harder or some shit.
The hilarious bit was all the shit libs backing comey during russiagate. It’s literally his fault she lost.
Don’t you see the contradiction in “she won the popular vote” and “she was a shit candidate”?
Both of these things can be true. If “did not vote” had been a candidate in 2016, it would have won in a landslide. Just 8 states + DC had enough voters turn out such that any candidate won more votes than there were eligible voters that didn’t bother. As a percentage of eligible voters, Clinton received 28.43% of eligible voters, with Trump trailing at 27.2% of eligible voters. While Trump outperformed Romney (2012) by 2M votes, Clinton underperformed Obama in 2012.
As a percentage of the entire US population (including those too young or other ineligible to vote) Clinton got votes from 20.30% of the population and Trump got votes from 19.41% of people.
They both sucked so badly that just over a quarter of eligible voters/less than a fifth of everybody was all it took to elect Trump
Bernie would have whooped trump in 2016. Shame the dnc decided to change the rules the day of to avoid a split ticket or God forbid, supporting the actually viable candidate.
Sanders, God love him, was not going to be electable. Had they run him, Trump would have picked up the whole of the big fat moderate lump in the middle of the bell curve.
Exactly like Boris Johnson did when he ran against Jeremy Corbyn. The capitalists simply won’t allow socialists to win in this environment.
Sanders, God love him, was not going to be electable. Had they run him, Trump would have picked up the whole of the big fat moderate lump in the middle of the bell curve.
This is simply false, and the same consistent misunderstanding of real politic that keeps the DNC on the struggle bus.
Sanders, God love him, was not going to be electable.
Literally every single poll says otherwise. We’ll never know for certain, but there’s much more evidence to support a Sanders victory than a Sanders loss, and claiming that Trump would have picked up enough moderates to win is baseless speculation.
Lol, no.
Bernie is the Ron Paul of the left; he has a small group of very loud supporters online who by constantly shouting at each other on the internet have convinced themselves that he’s actually some sort of populist god. I mean seriously, he couldn’t even win the popular vote in the Democratic Primary in 2016, losing to Hillery by over three million votes, where were all the extra voters to “whoop” Trump supposed to come from?
Bernie would have whooped trump in 2016. Shame the dnc decided to change the rules the day of to avoid a split ticket or God forbid, supporting the actually viable candidate.
DNC/DCCC isn’t exactly in the business of winning elections. If it comes between winning an election and BAU (they’d rather have a republican they can ‘work’ with), they pick BAU. They’ll happily (and have) fund Republicans over Progressives.
Or blame both.
There’s more than one way to solve most problems, and more than one cause as well. Would a stronger candidate have succeeded? Perhaps. But that was a solution for earlier in the process. A solution for late in the process was voters turning up.
We literally had that candidate and he got fucked over by super deligates or some nonsense.
I’m sick of being blamed when I voted for someone as vile as hrc. Dems lost the vote, not me.
Maybe if hrc actually showed up to purple states and appealed to actual voters it would have went differently.
I mean, I will always be mad at the DNC for not running Sanders.
Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna vote Biden in Nov 2024 though.
Then you aren’t mad at the DNC you support their decision to keep the status quo in check
Bruh I participated in the 2020 Nevada caucuses when I lived there, and I stood for Bernie (which he won btw, Biden took second). Idk what else you want me to do when he didn’t make the final cut.
I will always vote for the Dem in the General, and do my best to make changes in the primary/local elections where I vote Progressive.
Otherwise, you risk a Republican winning the General, and that will mean FURTHER devastation for American society at a quicker pace.
So we’re gonna act like winning the popular vote and losing isn’t a problem in and of itself?
Of course it’s a problem. But people point to this and say “the system’s broken [of course it is], so why vote!” Which is what the most fascist, anti-freedom politicians want. Functionality, it’s the same as voting for the ‘R’ in every election.
If you don’t vote defensively, you are part of the problem. This is true whether you are in a multiparty system or the ‘American one’.
Not the user I was expecting to see post this. Good look.
Hopefully more people are waking to the very obvious fact that there are a ton of right wing trolls on here pretending to be leftists. The most obvious one is all over this thread.
I refuse to accept the premise of lesser evil. It’s a false choice.
Here’s an idea, actually have candidates that support the people, not their donors. Until then, I won’t vote for any of them.
