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
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.
Yeah Biden is only the first one so 1-3 = 2 so he’s good candidate
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.
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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.
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.
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?
“Pro-Trump Russian asset Wikileaks reveals that DNC said mean things about our Lord and Savior Bernie Sanders”
Seriously, have you actually looked at the Wikileak emails rather than the hype? It’s the weakest shit imaginable.
You sound like someone who thinks Russiagate and rachel maddow were legit. WikiLeaks used to be trumpeted by liberals as a bastion of truth untill Assange came out with the corrupt dnc stuff. Which you can still all read, yes they conspired with Hillary. MSNBC and CNN gave her easy questions while grilling Bernie. “Weakest shit indeed”.
If the establishment doesn’t like the candidate they won’t get airtime. Same shit with Dean Philips and Marianne Williamson. The Biden team places some phone calls and bam your campaign is dead and no airtime/coverage. Are they viable candidates, who knows?
Should they at least get airtime and be heard in a democratic process?? Yes…
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.
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.
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?
If Hilary hadn’t been a pile of shit doing private speaking engagements for billionaires that were so hush hush that they set up massive white noise generating speaker systems, people would have voted for her.
if Hilary had set a fucking foot in some of the states she lost, people would have voted for her.
if Hilary didnt make stupid fucking comments, people would have voted for her.
Maybe if you stopped blaming voters, and blamed the shitty fucking candidates, someone less awful would have run, and won.
Blame the DNC. They’re the one cramming shitty candidates down our throats. If OP is right, and voting for president is just changing the oil, it’s like getting charged $2000 for Dollar General oil.
Stop blaming voters. Field actual, progressive, leftist candidates. I am fucking sick of voting for right wing, war hawk Democrats to “save democracy.” We aren’t saving anything, just watching stock market addicted octagenarians kill the country slower than the other team.
cough Michigan cough. Bitch took us for granted. The DNC shit the whole bed that election.
Did a gendered insult help make your point?
Edit: this is perhaps the most “controversial” thing I’ve posted online and just wanted to say it is an odd thrill to have random internet strangers having a negative reaction to something you said. Brains are strange.
Ya know, getting on each other’s throats because our words aren’t nice enough is a part of how this mess started.
I see what you’re saying but if my comment would be considered getting on someone’s throat than I think it may be time to take a step back and take a deep breath.
Ok then her dipshit ass campaign took my state for granted, barely campaigned here, and lost Michigan and the election. The dumb fucking DNC gave up on any election that wasn’t federal after Obama and that didn’t help the fucking idiots either.
I wasn’t saying your point was invalid, so I’m not sure why you repeated it here.
Does language policing make you feel good about yourself?
Haha, no, I don’t think so, but I’ve definitely been wrong before :) I guess it’s been something I’ve been trying to ask myself and felt like a valid thing to ask here.
Tell your handlers that for this farce to continue you must concede us a win occasionally. Practice what you preach. Incremental progress. Min wage increase here, universal healthcare there.
As it stands now all you fuckers do is lie. Lie and wag your fingers at people who know how the system works better than you do.
Thats the compromise. We accept your lukewarm, limpwristed, milquetoast bullshit in exchange for incremental progress. But you’ve offered no progress. When challenged even slightly you sprint for votes from the right which only leads to you losing elections and further alienating those to the left of fucking Reagan.
Those Republicans you’re courting despise you and will never support you in meaningful numbers. They’re comfortable and only care about 2 things. Property Values and Taxes.
If Obama had fought for his seat, Roe would still be the law. Dems never ever fight. They cry about how they can’t do anything. Even when they have the house, senate, and white house, they couldn’t do anything. Watch the excuses that follow this comment.
Neither capitalist party will ever help because they’re both avowed capitalists.
Vote dem, move right slowly. Vote GOP move right fast AF, with added racism, hatred, and Christo-fascist oppression as well.
But ultimately, NO capitalist party will ever fix anything in this shit two party system. Both parties get all their campaign donations from the same billionaires., and companies.
Vote dem, move right slowly. Vote GOP move right fast AF, with added racism, hatred, and Christo-fascist oppression as well.
It comes down to that the DNC/ DCCC and their voters are fundamentally not aligned in terms of incentives and priorities, and most discussant in places like this simply do not appreciate that. Whereas, the GOP and their voter base,are at least aligned, on their priorities and at least dubiously on incentives. This is demonstrated by their ability to provide for their voters once in office. You can and should hate what the priorities of the GOP are, however, you shouldn’t deny that they deliver for their voters when it comes time to do so. They make their voters priorities a priority once elected, and work their asses off to get these shitty, inhumane policies into place.
The DNC/DCCC have historically treated their voters as an inconvenience, in a very technocratic, “we’re the experts, we know better” fashion. Its a kind of anti-populism that was best expressed in the Hillary campaign, but also in how Obama ran his administration. To the DNC/DCCC, their voters are an inconvenience at best. Frankly, they’d probably prefer having a rightwing base, because they would better align with their actual prioritize. The result is that when elected, DCCC candidates don’t work or fight for the things they campaigned on, because they truly don’t think those things are priorities. This trickles down into a lack of results to their base, causing them to struggle because they consistently fail to deliver for the people that vote for them.
Edit because I wanted to highlight some things…
Observe the difference:
Hillary on the trail, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN6iwqthZrU
Hillary takes the position of “knowing better”, that the protesters need to basically sit down and shut up.
Bernie on the trail, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjt56Tdhhqk
Bernie gives them the mic and the time to get their message across.
In my lifetime, a dem only ever once gave me something to vote FOR, and I actively campaigned for him-Obama. And the first thing he did was give up on universal care and then even on public option. But he’s making millions by leveraging his presidency, so he’s a good little capitalist.
And the banks still appreciate him vailing them out while ficking us all and all our municipalities, etc.
Yeah, the corrupt as fuck supreme court made sure that billionaires would run the country.
And they have helped over and over to disable democracy and reduce the ability of citizens to affect change over monied interests who buy Thomas his motor home and other “gifts” (spelled bribes). And Scalia, and the others…
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.
But people did vote for Hillary, IIRC, she won the popular vote by like 3 million votes.
So it wasnt a lack of voting that gave trump the presidency and repealed abortion rights. It was the mecanisms and institutions that are part of your electoral process and that only seem to exist in order to dilute your democracy (e. voting districts, electoral college) that gave trump the win.
Perhaps people would be more willing to vote if their voices were actually heard.
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Well no. Hillary was a center-right candidate. If she wanted votes from progressives or left-wing voters, she knew exactly what to do. But she threw those votes away, relying on rhetoric like this post. We all saw it happening, and she did it anyway. What if she had pushed for universal health care, or unions, or campaign finance reform, or gun laws, or against wars? It would have been an exciting election.
This is just another version of vote blue no matter who. It’s just as dumb as people who only vote Republican. Trump didn’t win that election, Hillary lost it.
Because people didn’t vote for her in some ridiculous form of protest
“ridiculous”
maybe don’t call people deplorables if you want people to like you or vote for you, how’s about that?
Copying and pasting my own comment from another thread:
If you want leftists to vote for dems, despite dems pissing on leftists at every possible chance and yelling at leftists to fall in line, I’ll show you how.
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Point out that voting will never, ever, ever move the democrat party to the left. You cannot vote the party harder to the left.
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Point out that Republicans are going to remain fascists.
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Point out that voting third party is a spoiler vote and will result in fascists winning.
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Point out that the actual way to move to the left is to unionize and organize at the grassroots level, to apply bottom-up pressure on the top.
The answer is not to pretend that Biden is anything other than a Neoliberal Capitalist. Leftists will correctly point out that Biden is still a lukewarm neoliberal maintaining the status quo, and feel further alienated by being told they should love him anyways. That just encourages voter apathy.
Additionally, this meme is wrong. Leftists voted, it was the centrists and moderates that didn’t. Hillary wasn’t appealing in any way, so only the people who really cared voted. Hillary still won the popular vote, she just lost the electoral college, and Trump succeeded in riling up the fascist base. Do not blame Leftists for not falling in line for an extremely unlikable candidate, they did regardless. Blame Hillary for doing jack-shit to energize the base.
It would also help to acknowledge the people who voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries are selfish pieces of shit who intentionally voted against progressive and leftist efforts. Attempting to gaslight us into thinking “we’re on the same side” when in fact these people intentionally fuck us over is ridiculous.
It’s certainly entitled, and I think a lot of it comes from liberals not understanding that both fascists and liberals have candidates that represent their views, but leftists do not. They lack the experience of having to settle for a lukewarm Capitalist and actually having to touch grass to attempt to fix things, while both Liberals and Fascists just have to vote for their respective parties.
I don’t expect a lot of understanding from the kind of people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries. But my view is if the same people who have all this energy to try to shame us into voting for Biden in the general applied that to shitty decisions in the primaries it might start to have an effect. Right now people proudly say they voted for Biden in the primaries because the alternatives were “too radical” or whatever. If every time they admitted that they got shamed for being selfish pieces of shit it might actually make a difference.
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So there is no winning, there’s just lesser losing
For most part, this is by design.
Countries around the world tend to have two major parties: “red neoliberals” and “blue neoliberals”. Which is great if you’re a neoliberal because nobody is going to get in your way of your profits with things like environmental and worker protections.
But they didn’t build this managed democracy by murdering their opposition, they just showed up with class solidarity.
Dig into their lives and they all come from a handful of expensive schools and move in the same expensive circles. Politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists and media owners, all of them only ever a few steps from “went to school together” or “married to some powerful persons sister”.
They look out for one another. Sure, in public they have their little spats, but it’s just a pantomime as they jostle for market share. “Left-wing media” sells left-wing news to left wing people while the right wing does the same, both of them seeking to maximise profits. Journalism is a side effect at best.
The moment someone with actual power threatens actual change, watch them unite to undermine them and keep the profits of their little rich people club safe.
But how often does that happen? They usually run functionally unopposed. Good people just don’t want to be politicians or journalists now, especially when they know they’re going to be constantly attacked until they burn out or get killed.
The power is there for the taking but most people can’t be bothered even reading this post, let alone pledging their lives to an uphill battle.
Until that changes, the rich, greedy, self-serving scumbags will just keep winning by default.
Our “lesser evil” option keeps moving further and further to the right each cycle.
Hence educating and organizing the other 364 days of the year.
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I’d say the people who voted third party are the ones who fucked around in 2016, and ALL of us found out because of it.
Dictatorship it is then. 3rd parties don’t stand a snowballs chance in hell right now.
Canvassing and outreach happen first, then you can vote for that party. Right now you’re literally handing Republicans the win if you vote 3rd party this election.
Dems deciding to fuck around and find out…
Yeah! Sending minorities to concentration camps will really show those Dems!
Because America isnt voting for change. They’re just moving towards fascism, either slow or fast.
If you tell anyone to change course and vote third party they get really mad at you here on Lemmy.
And Mutton Chops down in Argentina has the audacity to cry at the WEF in Davos saying that socialism is threatening the West…
But yes. If you want Trump to win, by all means, vote 3rd party.
Does this mean that your two party system is actually just a one party system?
They are both Capitalist parties. America doesnt have a working class party
Do you think hyping up elections with a free democracy dog (a hotdog on election day) would make voting sexy enough that people would show up to the polls? Like Australia.
Couple of small corrections about Australian elections:
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The democracy sausage is not free (at least when I’ve gone to vote)
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Everyone has to vote or they get fined, it’s not like people go just because of the sausage
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