brave enough to abandon the reassurance of a mainstream party to try to affect real change
Being bad at math and ignoring political reality does not make you brave. It makes you foolish and short-sighted. Like I said, an unserious, counterproductive child.
Physics I guess. It’s been over a decade since I was studying it seriously, but I do try to stay relatively up to date with major developments when I can.
Only if you’re a spoiled child incapable of thinking any further ahead than right now.
On the contrary, that’s your position. You want the revolution right now without the work required to build it, regardless of who gets hurt in a failed attempt. Spoiled and short-sighted nonsense.
the only answer is to destroy the whole machine.
We don’t have the organized power to do that yet.
Voting outside the duopoly or abstaining altogether offer even a slim chance of that
Only in your mind. Not in reality. There is absolutely zero evidence that that works.
when even more Dem voters realize that the DSA isn’t going to change anything either, I expect the rate of attrition for the Neoliberal ghouls to increase starkly.
Counterproductive doomerism. You’re not a serious adult.
That strategy is only rational if you believe that voting progressive in the primary will create change faster than the status quo will kill us all.
False. The best strategy is still the best strategy even if the outcome is still bad. Voting for a third party has a worse outcome. Not voting has a worse outcome. Despite voting for Dems still being a bad outcome, it is the least bad achievable outcome. Hence, harm reduction.
And forty years of the party continually fucking off further right at the behear of it’s Wall St paymasters screams loudly that that belief is a fantasy, and your strategy is delusional.
On the contrary, it screams loudly that protest voting is not only ineffective, it’s counterproductive. When they lose progressives, they don’t shift left, they shift right to try to get more centrists.
You continue to hand power to the people making things worse faster and pretend your protest achieves something. It does not, the rightward shift of the Democrats screams this.
Because they do slightly less harm than the fascists. I’m not even voting for the Dems, I’m just voting against the fascists. It’s not a cheap dodge, it’s the whole principle. Voting isn’t going to give us “good” anytime in the.near future, so trying to use it for that is foolish. The comparatively slow march towards fascism under the Dems gives us time to utilize tools besides voting: mutual aid, community building, workplace democracy, etc.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the concept of “harm reduction”. It doesn’t mean “Vote for Democrats because they will reduce the harm caused by fascists”. It means “Both the Dems and fascists cause harm, but the Dems cause less harm, and since one of the two is going to win in the current political landscape, voting for Dems reduces the amount of harm added”.
The only rational voting strategy is voting for leftists in the Democratic primary, and then voting against the fascists in the general, even if that means voting for the neo-lib. If you want to vote against the fascists while also voting for a leftist, you need to make sure leftists win the Democratic primary. We’re seeing that starting now.
I expected it, I just hoped you were better than that. How is harm increase beneficial in any way? Absolute nonsense.
Go volunteer for your local DSA.
I do.
it won’t even take you ten years to realize how utterly futile it is to expect the Democratic Party to fight fascism in any effective sense.
Good thing I don’t expect that. You’ve misunderstood my point really, really badly.
Once again wrong on all counts. Biden got the highest vote count in history.
I’m not wasting any more time with your foolishness. You sound like a high schooler, come back when you’re ready to join us in reality.
Second paragraph on page 41 in the first document
Yes, that was the one reference to capitalism which I referred to. It doesn’t say what you’re implying it does.
That’s not what I said they did
No, but that is what the current administration is doing. So yes, there is a difference.
Had the party you’re scolding people for turning on not spent damn near half a century gleefully helping the other half of the uniparty gut the working class and force people into serfdom, Trump would never have gotten on the ballot in the first place.
Hard disagree.
you are absolutely advocating for people to continue doing exactly what created the problem, and scolding people who won’t join you in that because you don’t understand the problem, nor how to solve it.
Again, no, that’s you. Your suggested actions won’t work, and you’re scolding people for damage mitigation. No one here is supporting neo-liberals, they’re fighting fascists. The fact that you’re intent on demonizing damage mitigation for a delusional fantasy where you sway 150 million people is all the proof I need that you’re not a serious adult worth continuing this conversation with. Come back after you’ve spent some actual time in the real world, and get some context for how social change works.
At what point during the Biden administration was that facility closed, or converted to something less awful?
Trump has a policy of separating families. Biden did not.
It’s not slowing the bleeding, it’s changing the subject so you don’t have to hear about the bleeding.
Only in your head.
Slowing the bleeding is getting enough third party people into office to jam up the gears of the orphan crushing machine, or dropping turnout on election day to a single digit percentage and robbing the ruling class of its legitimacy.
And how many years have you been trying that with no results? Neither of those things is going to happen anytime soon. Third party votes are in the single digits, and 150M+ people vote every election. And “Legitimacy” only exists in your head. You know what happens if voting numbers drop to single digits? The candidate with the most votes still wins. If only one person in the whole country votes, their candidate wins. Your strategy is not effective. Your goal is noble, but your method is counterproductive.
Both of those documents list anticapitalist views among warning signs of domestic terrorism.
Prove it, because I looked and couldn’t find it.
permission to use anticapitalist views as a reason to open an investigation into someone who isn’t even accused of doing anything else.
Which is a different thing than using anti-capitalist views alone to arrest someone.
Keep doing the thing that created the problem on the first place, some day it will solve the problem
You’re the one doing that. How many decades of protest voting, and what has it accomplished? We have this problem because of people like you, who confuse strategic action with boot licking. Without people like your, we would’ve gotten Gore in 2000, and we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Delude yourself well you like, but don’t try to moralize your foolishness.
Hey. Remember when the Biden Administration listed “anticapitalist views” as a good reason to suspect someone of being a domestic terrorist?
No, and the documents you linked don’t either. “Capitalism” only appears once, and while violent anti-government/anti-authority action is referenced, being anti-capitalist is not in itself started to be a cause for suspicion. They only talk about the targets violent anti-capitalists might choose.
And yet you vote for the austerity party instead of going for any of the various left wing parties and devoting your energy there
I spend my energy supporting a left wing party. I vote for that left wing party in Democratic primaries, when available. But voting for a third party in the general election helps no one except the fascists.
You’re here scolding people who held to their principles and voted for what they want
What they want doesn’t matter if they don’t have the ability to get it. If we had ranked choice voting or something, you’d have a point. But we don’t, so voting for what you want is mathematically worse than voting against the worst outcome.
can you at least quit actively endorsing the status quo?
If you think I’m endorsing the status quo, you haven’t paid attention to a single word I’ve said. I’m very much not endorsing the status quo, I’m endorsing a specific action within the status quo to mitigate damage until we have the organized power to dismantle the status quo, and dismantling the status quo is in fact what I’m endorsing. But that takes time, and until then our best electoral action is voting for leftists in the primary, and voting against the far right in the general. Luckily, we’re reaching a point where leftists are winning more primaries, so hopefully in a few cycles we won’t have to vote lesser evil anymore. But I’m not going to pretend we’re closer to that than we are.
These tactics aren’t remotely new. It’s the same tactics that have been used on communities of color, left wing agitatorsz and queers who wouldn’t stay safely closeted for 100 years.
And now they’ve been ramped up. Great for you that it doesn’t affect you personally, but I don’t really care about you. I care about the people affected.
Only “some” of the camps are new. Hmmm… Now why would thete be old ones if Trump is a new and unique kind of villain?
Compare and contrast the new with the old.
Yeah. It’s the difference between being a candidate and being the President
Except one of the candidates did campaign on bombing Iran. So no.
Or are you genuinely saying that you think Dems don’t start wars just as quickly and easily as Republicans?
As quickly, easily, and frequently? Definitely not.
As long as they can convince you there’s any substance to those differences without actually having to do anything that will piss off their Wall St paymasters, you will never be able to organize to replace either of the two.
Very false. The only substance to those differences is slowing the bleeding, but that is something. They’re never going to change, they have to be replaced, but that takes time. Time I would rather spend under the lesser evil than the greater one, especially when the greater evil imprisons organizers.
The only thing new is that the same billionaire owned media that never made a peep about it is suddenly putting it in your face
No, these tactics are new, some of the camps are literally new.
Throughout the entire 2024 campaign.
There’s a stark difference between “Iran is an adversary” and “Bomb Iran”.
Strike the word “can’t” and the sentence above becomes accurate.
Again, wrong. Yes they’re both bad, yes they both engage in some of the same terrible things, but there are still differences. Until we have the organization to replace one of the two, we have to focus on those differences. Once we actually have the numbers and organization to do something different, I’m all for it. Until then, bOtH SiDeS is an outrageously privileged cope.
I guess if you’re one of the privileged managerial class in a major city, that’s true.
If that’s you, you’re one of the least affected, not most.
Or are we pretending that ICE appeared from a misty portal on the morning of 1/20/25?
No, but their current actions did, at least at this scale.
That Harris wasn’t beating the war drums with Iran and campaigning to Trump’s right on immigration?
When did that happen?
if you’re judging Democrats by their rhetoric instead of by their record, then you’re not a serious adult worth having this conversation with.
I don’t care about their rhetoric, but if you can’t see the difference between their record and the Republicans, you’re not a serious adult worth having this conversation with. Both sides are obviously bad, but equally obviously not equally bad.
Once again, the people who are going to suffer either way do not affect my choice. But this administration has been objectively worse for the undocumented, so I’m not sure what your point is. Abstaining and voting third party helped this anti-immigrant administration win.
voting for Kamala Harris was objectively better than abstaining or voting third party
It objectively was. Neither abstaining nor voting third party helped those people, and now more of them are suffering than would have under the Harris administration. Based on the logic of abstainers/third party voters, they’re the ones throwing people under the bus to try to “send a message” to the DNC.
A genocidal fascist was going to win either way. This one seemed more genocidal from the outset, and the last two years corroborates that.
It’s not about the people who would have suffered either way, I can’t presently do anything about that but I’m trying. It’s about all the extra people who are suffering now: immigrants in death camps, victims of slashed social programs, the dead Iranians on the other side of that expensive gas.
I can’t save Palestine right now. I lack the leverage. But I could’ve helped save many of the others, and you could’ve too. It works better together. Don’t get distracted by the horrors you can’t fix, focus on the ones where you can at least slow the bleeding
The answer is that one of the choices, while still shitty and possibly even more painful, creates the possibility for a better future despite the present.
I have the right to decide to suffer the sting of disinfectant, it’s my body. I don’t have the right to condemn others for the sake of political expedience.
Not voting for them is what forces the party to offer legitimate opposition to fascism and representation of the lower class.
No it doesn’t. When has it ever done that? Typically it just pushes them right to try to get more centrists.
Vote for the leftists in the primary. That’s what forces them. You don’t appeal to them, you annex them.
Not voting is literally doing nothing. It is not the crystal clear communication signal you think it is, it’s literally nothing.
if I let the democrats know that not even genocide will cost them the election
I keep seeing variations on this, and no one has been able to explain to me how that communication vector works. When has that ever worked? They just double down or shift right to try impotently to scoop “moderate Republicans”. If they really are a uniparty, do you think they really care that much about winning or losing anyway? They’re gonna keep supporting genocide no matter how many times they lose.
The point isn’t to try to persuade the DNC (by doing literally nothing), the point is to slow the bleeding while we build what comes next.
glad to see at least one blue dog understands there’s other tools.
Those are the main tools. Voting is the “other” tool. But it’s an easy tool, and it scales well with community organization. Seriously, take over a small municipality.
As opposed to the other side who also arrested peaceful protesters on bogus charges. Who also beat up protesters. Who also broke up strikes. Who also hounded leftist organisers
Exactly. "Also"s don’t matter when you make the choice. The things that are the same are gonna be the same either way. What matters are the differences, and there are obvious differences. Like labelling “aintifa” a terrorist organization.
People are much more agitated under Trump. Organizing is easier in many ways.
Of course, on the backs of already marginalized people. I don’t have the stomach to knowingly increase the suffering of others for political gain.
I don’t get this argument. How are the kids in Gaza doing any better since Harris lost?