And this dumb ass shit is how you get a second term of trump you fucking troglodytes.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Voting is the bare fucking minimum. You want more change you have to do more. Help candidates you like by volunteering your time, vote in primaries especially, and your local elections. A city council member might end up mayor, might end up senator, might end up presidential hopeful. Push for ranked choice voting, write your reps and tell them that is what you want.
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Huh. I never thought about how Big Bird actually was controlled before. Neat.
Apparently by defense contractors.
#birdsarentreal
The only way to 100% solve this is by:
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organizing, supplanting party insiders from the ground up over years, with hard work and dedication through many years, with no guarantee of success
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risk it for a biscuit
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accept messy incrementalism into your heart
Eh, global thermonuclear warfare might do in a pinch.
I'm gonna put that on the "bad options" pile and recommend therapy.
It's almost like the generations and groups that care about not going to war and whatnot don't go out and vote...
Anti-war lefties tend to be comfortable voting for third party candidates.
Yup. The only practical effect of which is to enable the Right.
Voting for the center-right Democrats enables the right as well, as necessary as some may feel it is to prevent the openly fascist candidates from winning. Democrat PACs give money to run ads for the most insane fascist Republican primary candidates, with the strategy being they are easier to win against, which has worked for them before. Hillary's campaign helped Trump's campaign in a similar manner. Over time this drags politics to the right.
This is a downward spiral, you can pick the fascist aesthetic of it or the one that says "don't worry everything is fine."
Almost like, instead of sitting out and complaining, we need to get involved in the primaries and go for the farthest left candidates who can win...
It's easy to sit on the sidelines and complain or to say voting is pointless. This enables the status quo. What's harder but meaningful is getting involved and affecting real change.
Agree and I also disagree that criticizing aspects and futility of presidential voting implies it's completely meaningless. The ideological consensus within the two main parties that came together over the past 30 years has never existed before, and the system was basically designed around independent rich landowners controlling the government, factions developing within this system was one of the main concerns. That's where it is now, two factions which each operate as a single ideological unit, led by some of the most historically disliked and unpopular people, both funded by planet-destroying interests.
In terms of action I look to what has led to major changes in the past, labor and class organization and agitation, and accepting that things are looking bad and that it's necessary to acknowledge this. Understanding how the present day system was basically designed around suppressing things like the Populist movement and any class consciousness, the Taft-Hartley act pacifying unions, and how fucked it is right now, is to me more important than blindly accepting the terms of party politics and letting that control your political behavior and dictate your opinions. That's why I have no time for entertaining the "don't criticize Democrats because you help fascism" line. People can vote strategically but the logical conclusion of that is to accept the status quo and the impending doom this system has already manifested, and continues to do at an accelerating rate.
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Good luck with the superdelegates overriding anyone who wants to effect change. Bernie, specifically, and whoever the next person will be. The DNC is a disgrace.
I think Obama represented the best the DNC can hope for in producing a candidate, and Adolph Reed Jr's 1996 column criticizing Obama was a perfect prediction of what became of his legacy.
I'm super curious what you wanted to have happen. Overall, Clinton won the Democratic primary vote 55% to 43%. So, the votes should have been over-ridden because the candidate you and I preferred got fewer votes? (Yes, they also got more delegates but at the end of the day, the vote total was in line with the delegates.)
Yup.
It's a specially weird attempt at a cynical flex for the US today, given how demonstrably cause-and-effect the vote will keep abortion rights in specific places.
Also, I'm not in favor of stopping arms supplies to Ukraine and Biden's position in Israel is more moderate than recently suggested and leaning more moderate as political pressure mounts, so I'm not even aligned with the premise anyway.
It's almost like of US would stop military spending, no dictatorship would join them, and would continue to arm themselves.
It's very easy to criticize it when you never experienced an actual war and never lived in a country that was invaded, because other countries are afraid of attacking your country.
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The feet are the financial industry.
And the cloaca are the healthcare providers.
I feel like the government is often a quest giver. The executive branch will let all of these companies run free so long as they do some project for the government on occasion. Like the NSA server deal with Microsoft. This is of course even more true with defense contractors, which get absurd contracts to "keep engineers trained" and the government tries to give the Mail Truck contract to Northrop-Grumman.
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