drthunder

The problem with having these arguments online is that you don’t actually know what nonentity did besides vote. What did you do? I’ve gone to rallies, I’ve written my representatives, I helped out at my college’s Gaza camp, I wrote and called my college’s chancellor about the Gaza camp, I’ve distributed literature about Palestine. And I fucking voted, uncommitted and then Harris, because as public enemy #1b (trans) I don’t have the privilege to let whoever wins win. Because people couldn’t be bothered to do the bare minimum and take an hour or two to go vote for the lesser evil, the government is erasing me from existence.

For fucking real. Are these pleas for nuance ever aimed at the people voting for real actual neo-Nazis, instead of the people the neo-Nazis are going after?

There are plenty of people who are marginalized or lacking in education who don’t vote Republican because it doesn’t take a college degree to see that Trump tried to overthrow the government. Just because guys who are mad about not getting laid become neo-Nazis doesn’t mean the rest of us who are dealing with hardship do. Black people have been getting shit on since well before this country was even a country and they’re the most reliable Democratic demographic there is. Pretty much everyone has access to the internet and if they cared to learn about they world they could.

Coming to VHS in fall 1998!

Gil desperately trying to sell Colecos convinced me as a kid that they were bad computers, and the association hasn’t completely gone away.

Agreed on everything except your last sentence. I argued with people all of last year saying what you’re saying. There were pretty quickly protests and rallies, off the top of my head I remember going to rallies in November 2023, January 2024, and June 2024, and people are still talking about it. I went to an event last weekend too.

I do see idiots both in real life and online who are clearly more interested in fighting the Democrats than actually helping the cause though; right after the election I went to a rally at which someone said she’ll work with anyone who wants to fight the Democrats, no mention of the impending dictatorship, and got applause, and it really put me off of my local activist scene.

There are idiots in the Palestine movement who didn’t vote, but there are plenty of people who voted for Harris too, myself included. It doesn’t take a psyop to see that a genocide that’s being live streamed is a genocide.

ICE told the government two or three weeks ago that they’d need like $26 billion to enforce the Laken Riley act, I think.

I’m biased because I wish what she advocated for was closer to what I want, but I think she needed to be bold. She had some good policies, but we need more than some good policies right now. We need to rethink how we live because our institutions are failing us. I don’t know for sure if she would have won, but I think Medicare for all, free school lunch, even more antitrust action (Lina Khan was one of Biden’s best picks), etc, probably would have helped.

And it’s one of the most useful government offices if you’re a billionaire who travels by plane everywhere. Plebs who have to drive everywhere are a lot less affected by overworked, overstressed, underpaid ATCs than guys like him.

I want to see some Nazis get hadoken’d

deleted by creator

Not having to tear things down would be great, but how do we do that at this point? The president is above the law, and has Congress, the courts, cops, a newly-freed legion of brownshirts, and an actual cult on his side. His party’s been getting away with ratfucking elections for at least 25 years.

I certainly think we can tear things down nonviolently, but we’re out of ways to do this politely. I don’t know how we get past the right-wing propaganda machine or government not being very democratic in the first place. We need to hugely expand the House, get rid of the Senate, and limit federal judge terms at the very least, and none of those are going to happen as long as the federal government is stacked in fascists’ favor. The last meaningful amendment was passed in 1971.

Why are the eggs being broken always regular people’s paychecks and food stamps? Why not rich people’s third vacation homes or yachts?

Yep, and austerity kills people. If you want to force the Pentagon to pass an audit before giving them another penny, be my guest, but “the government” isn’t wasteful.

Also even if everything ends up being funded again, this put a whole ton of needless stress on people wondering if they’re gonna get paid.

I wonder what the mildest thing a true AI could tell the oligarchs to do that would make them shut it down. Giving 10% of their wealth away and not in a tax dodge way? Stop funding fascists?

Not to be confused with Times Square

On top of what everyone else has said, I’m gonna be that person and bring up capitalism, which I’m defining as private ownership of business (as opposed to state ownership, or ownership by the workers, etc). Capitalism concentrates money, and by extension power, which is never good for people without it. I’ll admit I’m biased as a socialist, but at this point the biggest indictment of capitalism for me is that most of what we’re seeing these days isn’t new: rampant wealth inequality which leads to institutions decaying, followed by liberal and conservative elites being either unable or unwilling to fix problems that are plain for everyone to see, followed by people being radicalized.

The new thing is global warming, which can’t be attributed solely to capitalism but is being exacerbated by it. A handful of people who get their money and power from fossil fuels would rather burn the world to ashes than give up that money and power (yes, they’re probably investing in renewables, but if they treated global warming like the existential threat it is, they wouldn’t be bankrolling climate deniers.

(this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Soviet Union or the current Chinese government, they are/were both also results of capitalism failing but neither of those is relevant to democracy failing in the West™ also I’m not a tankie, authoritarianism of every stripe is bad)

Having an idea of the government we want to have before shit goes down is a great idea. I’ve thought about writing down my thoughts for what a better government would look like and maybe I should do that. I’m sure none of us randos on Lemmy would be the people in the room where it’s happening, but if we talk about it maybe we can influence it.

I saw a take a few months ago that voting third party isn’t voting your conscience, voting your conscience is going against what you really want to do, to do what will actually result in the least harm happening. Our system of government is absolute trash but until it changes (and we should all be pushing for it to change) this is what we’ve got.