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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Your vote matters.
If 100% of voters voted liberal in the upcoming election, the one after that would have way more left leaning candidates.
Your vote directly matters.
I don’t honestly see why that would be the case. If they’ve already won, why bother changing?
As we see with the Republicans eating themselves, there will always be opportunists looking to take down their own and fill the Gap. But we can use that to our advantage to get the legislation we actually want. But we kind of have to take care of the crazies before we can 100% focus on fixing our house.
That didn’t exactly answer the question. If Democrats consistently get all the power, why would they bother changing? Don’t they already have what they want?
If the right never wins, they move further left to collect more centrist votes. If the right moves more left, the left moves more left to differentiate themselves and appeal to the more progressive crowd that might otherwise vote green party or some other third party.
This has actually been happening for the last few decades but in the other direction. Left leaning voters not turning out for elections, partially because Dems have a history of suppressing exciting progressive candidates meant that Dems sought more centrists to compete with the right. Particularly after 5 of the 6 presidential elections went to Republicans between the late 60s and late 80s So they moved further right as a result. Both Clinton’s, Obama and Biden are not progressive, they’re barely left of center. The Democrat Party actively discourages progressivism, particularly in presidential candidates, to make them feel “safe” and “reasonable” to centrists. That shift to the right meant that the right has had to appeal more to the relative eccentrics on the right like anarcho-capitalist libertarians, the Christian nationalists, and the white nationalists. And not just at a presidential level but on every level even down to school boards. Thus our current status quo.
Not that Nixon, Reagan, or the Bushes were at all good people, but at the very least they didn’t feel comfortable publically and openly appealing to bigotry and the dismantling of the federal government as a campaign tactic. That is no longer the case with the modern GOP.
If the right never wins, they move further left to correct more centrist votes
That would be the theory, but it doesn’t seem to actually play out in practice. Look at the UK, where worsening performance in recent elections and drastically worse polling at present is leading to their right wing doubling down and being upset that their leader’s policies aren’t right-wing enough.
Or Australia, where at the last election our right-wing had its moderates absolutely wiped out by even more moderate independents (and in some cases, by proper progressives). There are no prominent moderates left in their parliamentary party. As a result, the people who are left are the right wing of the party, and they have selected as their leader a rabid tough-line conservative.
Question on more left leaning candidates - do you think there’s a possibility a progressive party can actually gain traction?
I like the thought of revamping the Green Party as it’s goals seem more relevant than ever, though they have to shed the kooky perception they’ve gained.
No, a third party will never make traction with our current voting system in place. The solution is the push the Democratic party left like Republicans have sprinted to the right (but obviously to not go crazy like they did).
No, a third party will never make traction with our current voting system in place.
Who said anything about a third party? I, for one, am hoping that the Republicans self-destruct thoroughly enough that the Democratic Party becomes the more right-wing of the two major parties.
except when I’m the minority in my area and my vote gets thrown in the trash
I voted for her despite my distaste for her, after primarying for and making calls for Sanders against her. I cast my ballot like I was attending a funeral. But I did it. Out of least worst, water pumps on the Titanic time buying harm reduction. Polling place was a ghost town.
What was your excuse?
Better yet, you hate her so much, where were you during the primary? There was a significantly better option.
Voting for the lesser of 2 bad options is.
Which is why I’m voting Biden out of harm reduction. His neoliberal, market capitalist ass will hurt the country less than the fascist.
No positive options, only degrees of bad.
No positive options, only degrees of bad.
what’s bad about cornel west or jill stein?
“If Poliece voted for Hillary in 2016…”
Hillary Clinton is/was not obliged to anyones vote and should have run a better campaign to attract leftest by doing bare minimun actions like supporting trans people or election/education reform. She also could have chosen a different candidate for running mate rather then the complete personality void that she ended up with as a sop to some imaginary “moderate conservitive” that was simpathetic to humanity over their net worth.
But she didnt. I wish she ran a better campaign as well, we may have been better off with her in office in 2016, but the issues that trump brought into focus in our society were not caused by him. They have been here the whole time.
The whole “you didn’t vote for Hillary so Trump is your fault” is a typical liberal statement. Just like how their solution to plastic pollution wasn’t to regulate the producers, but to get everyone to recycle things. And then if an individual didn’t recycle that person was bad, but they ignore what the massive industry is doing.
Same with health care. Their solution wasn’t universal coverage, it was making sure every individual had to buy health insurance, and then fining the individuals who didn’t. No action against the massive, inefficient industry causing most of America’s health care problems. Nope, it was passing the buck off to individuals yet again.
The Clinton campaign sucked. It was so dull the news shows would rather show an empty Trump podium than a speech by her. I thought the reason Clinton won the primary was because people wanted adults in charge who knew what they were doing, but clearly they didn’t because she lost to a reality TV show con man.
I thought the reason Clinton won the primary was because people wanted adults in charge who knew what they were doing,
And I think she won because she worked out a deal with the super delegates from 2008 when Obama “stole” the nomination from her.
Similarly, if the DNC hadn’t absolutely SCREWED my boy Bernie, we also wouldn’t be in this complete shit-hole.
A socialist will never be elected. When anyone gets close, the entire capitalist world immediately forget their differences and unite to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Happened to Sanders.
If you want read a more heinous example, it’s Jeremy Corbyn. A genuinely good man .
Demsocs (really, socdems) still believe in capitalism. They’re not quite Debs levels of socialist.
It’s probably more accurate to state that they believe capitalism and markets to be two separate things, for example a market economy where every business is a multi-stakeholder worker-consumer coop and workers and “consumers” alike can consent to what happens at work, would be at odds with private ownership given that everyone is an owner with decision making power (collective/socialized ownership). This is pretty much what Corbyn and the Labour party a few years back were aiming for - they were going to experiment with cooperatives by having the government encourage and fund them.
