atearinspace

I think that’s a really strong argument for voting with choice you have, not the one you should have.

Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. At this point though, I have come to the realization that the 2 party state can't be beat simply by a small percentage of people voting with their conscience. As noble as it is, we just can't win that way. It's going to take some real organization to win the privilege of being able to vote with our conscience and having a real chance to make change. We are going to have to change the system by doing more than just voting for a 3rd party.

It makes me sad to hear you say voting Greens “weighs heavy” on you though! Democracy often isn’t as strong as it should be, and people are forced between supporting candidates they dislike, or accepting their vote won’t count, but that isn’t your fault!

I may be being too hard on myself and I appreciate your perspective here. We really are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to elections and "democracy" in this country. The consequences are real, though. When I see that many women now have to travel to other states to get an abortion or be forced to have a child they didn't want it's hard to not feel some responsibility. I don't want to wallow in it, though. I want to help bring about some real change. To me, that means doing what I can to do some harm reduction come election time, but then organizing beyond that to make something better. Continuing on our current path is just not sustainable.

I’m a long time 3rd party voter, starting from when I could first vote in the late 90’s. I voted Green in 2016 and it weighs heavily on me right now. As awful as the Clintons are, we have had some real terrible consequences since then. Real people are hurting more because of Trump getting into office.

I still believe that the electoral system needs real change. I still think that the Democrats haven’t done much to help the working class. I’d still rather see all hierarchies flattened and power come from the bottom up. Unfortunately, voting outside of our shitty two party system does nothing to help this.

If we want real change we’re going to have to make it happen. Not with pulling the levers of the state, but with real organizing, mutual aid, and dual power. However, that doesn’t mean pulling the levers of the state isn’t harm reduction. We (I) could have reduced a lot of harm since 2016 if we would have just pulled those levers. It doesn’t take much time to do it, so just do it.

Lmao, no meth involved but it was totally methhead family bonding time.

I feel like in his later years he spent too much time dunking on anarchists. I think there is a lot of good in Communalism but don’t necessarily think it needs to be in conflict with ideologies such as Anarchism. If you get rid of some of the fluff such as constitutions then it’s basically a way to organize an anarchist society and fits well with syndicalism. Communalism as a way to organize where we live and syndicalism as a way to organize where we work.

It was recently done in Montana: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kids-sued-montana-over-climate-change-and-won/ This is the group of lawyers that were involved with that plus many other suits across the country: https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/

Nice! I will start putting some feelers out with my local freecycle and buy nothing groups and see where to go from there. Thanks for the info!

I’ve been thinking of doing something similar. Where do you source the ewaste laptops?

It's been interesting seeing the reactions to the air quality alerts in my area's local social media (Facebook groups, Nextdoor, etc). There is a sizable amount of people talking about how the air quality alerts are there to make us scared so we can be controlled. It's really amazing how this is right in our face but there are still people who want to deny that it's a problem.