BlueMAGA is literally Russian propaganda. Anyone who uses the term unironically is a troll.
I use it unironically and just think you’re an idiot.
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Liz Cheney
Neither blue or MAGA tbh
Do tell how she ended up on a stage next to Kamala if she was not Blue.
The MAGA part is the denialism from Democrats about it.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Liz Chaney is a staunch opponent of Donald Trump, she is a career politician, and the last of the Grand-Old-Party. In a desperate attempt to stop MAGA from replacing the GOP Liz Chaney aligned herself with Kamila Harris and that’s why. I’d argue that makes her a Red Democrat more than a Blue Republican but really that’s down to interpretation. I don’t think anyone was in denial about why she was being paraded around like neat novelty. These are strange times my dudes.
For a second I thought I saw my name and was confused what this had to do with me :-D
I mean you guys elected that asshole…
I was also on the side of vote for Kamala fix it after because with Trump fixing is impossible with Kamala maybe. But whenever I see stuff like
45 Democrats Vote With GOP to Pass Bill Sanctioning ICC Over Netanyahu Warrant
Senate Overwhelmingly Rejects Sanders Resolutions to Block Arms Sales to Israel
it makes me doubt how feasible this approach would be too. Sure Kamala is factors of magnitude better than Trump for the USA, for Ukraine, for LGBTQ people, for women etc. But I can understand a US citizen with roots in the middle east etc not voting for Democrats after seeing disgusting stuff like this.
“PATRIOT Act” passed Senate 98 to 1. Partisanship is for complete morons.
45 out of 215 Democrats voted for that or around 21% vs 90% of Republicans. This means that the crazy option is wildly unpopular and would never pass under a democrat. I’m not seeing the problem here.
45 out of 215 Democrats voted for that or around 21% vs 90% of Republicans.
21% of Democratic voters voting for Republican candidates would be completely unacceptable. Why is it ok for 21% of our representatives to vote for genocide?
Oh right. It’s ok when it’s the only thing centrists actually want.
45 democrats didn’t vote the way you want? And how many republicans didn’t? Are you really saying both sides are the same?
No they are not but I am convinced that about 2/3 of the democrats don’t give a shit about the party they are a member of nor its voters. If their only opportunity was to be a republican candidate they would jump at that opportunity without any internal moral conflicts. And I understand how frustrating it must be when a majority of a party that you are told to vote for has no moral issues with bombing a country where your relatives live to the ground.
There are 215 Democrats currently serving in the house. The 45 that voted with Republicans don’t even make up a quarter let alone 2/3.
I am talking about the Sanders vote though. I think, there were about 10 that said yes to stop selling weapons.
Privatized gains, socialized losses except instead of losing money, your daughters die of a miscarriage in the waiting rooms of hospitals
Missed the point again award. If people want to vote for conservatives, they’re going to vote for conservatives, not conservatives lite. If people want to vote for leftists, they’re going to vote third party, vote for the dipshit threatening to tear it all down, or stay home, not vote for conservatives lite. If you’d take a few seconds to really use your noggin, you’d understand that people are fucking drowning and desperate for a change. Not “lol the guys at the Goldman Sachs fundraiser said we should think about a 1% COLA for social security”, I’m talking burn the house down and start over change. There’s a reason why there’s the phenomenon of the Obama-Bernie-Trump voter or Bernie-Trump voter. It’s not the sexism, it’s the promise of change. Obama failed to deliver, and Bernie didn’t happen, which just leaves us with that fucking guy. The democrats miscalculated twice and thought that voters surely wouldn’t vote for that fucking guy over their promise of change so mild that even fox news would get bored. It’s not the voter’s fault that the democrats failed to put forward a good platform. To the Democratic party and the people towing this line, I say: voters don’t owe you victory. In fact, voters don’t owe you a goddamn thing. Stop blaming them and get your shit together or get out of the way.
Yes to all of this. Neolibs in this thread are really pressed.
I don’t even want the democrats to get their shit together. I want them to get the fuck out of the way. That party needs to go the way of the fucking whigs.
When Democrats move to the right in order to capture conservative votes, conservatives don’t believe they’re sincere. But the left does.
The AOC+Trump voters would also fall into that category
Very fucking right. It’s toe the line though if you’re interested in improving things in a very small way.
I’ve heard that before, but tow the line, as in to pull something by a tether, makes contextual sense to me. Folks are doing work trying to carry that argument.
The phrase is authoritarian. As in “you’d better get your toes on the line I just drew in the dirt, or I’m gonna hang ya, boy.”
Didn’t know that, thanks!
I do love it when you can justify using a different homophone than the etymologically correct one.
“eggcorns”. You can really do some fun ones. For all intensive purposes, they’re pretty much equivalent.
At least centrists didn’t have to move left.
Yes, they got to maintain their rightwing purity.
This is like being smug because you let the dog shit inside to make a point about how you never wanted a dog in the first place.
At least your purity is intact, and that’s what matters most.
Nobody let a dog shit anywhere. Trump gained like 3 million votes compared to last time, and Harris/Biden lost like 6 million. You want to blame someone, blame the 77 million openly fascist voters, not the < 1 million third party voters who didn’t make up a sixth of the difference that your genocidal candidate lost by. The fact that you want to go online and pontificate about how the real activists cost the election, when they didn’t, just shows that for you this is all about your ego and has nothing to do with justice or making a better world. You can’t even take responsibility for the absolute monster you did vote for. You can’t even get the facts of the situation straight, that’s how much you really care.
Bruh I am not the one going into every thread whining about centrists. Right or wrong, acting smug isn’t helpful to all the actual vulnerable people who are about to eat shit. I get that y’all are privileged enough that it doesn’t matter, but how about a bit of empathy for those who aren’t.
Oh yeah, the old “the only people in the US pointing out that it’s an empire that kills millions of people are privileged” line.
My point is largely that the hallmark of an internet troll is that they don’t ever engage on any other topics and then change the subject early and often. We are talking about whether it’s productive to come into every thread about US politics and be smug that Donald Trump won, and whether this serves any productive political endgame besides some kind of juvenile accelerationism.
I’m not sure what empire has to do with it or how you think Donald Trump is going to change that.
Now I’m confused. Who is your original message about?
Well of course! You’re privileged to be American! Now pick up that rifle, American Exceptionalism needs to be enforced by violent colonization under the guise of nation building. That IPhone was made in China after all.
*ignores voters*
*loses election*
“heh, stupid voters”
More brilliant political analysts who still haven’t managed to figure out the reason both parties near-unanimously support genocide. Have a downvote, on me.
Also, Dems lost, what was it, 10x as many votes as people who voted third party?
And notice where your outrage is actually directed here. Not at the people who actually VOTED for Trump. It’s at the people who refused to compromise their morals AT ALL, unlike you all, who completely compromised your morals in a failing bid to elect Mrs. “Genocide With A Facelift”.
Fuck Republicans, fuck Democrats. That moral superiority you so desperately want to claim, does not exist. You are the problem. You are the driving force behind the empire. You are responsible for their deaths. Take your attempt to blame actual activists and people actually struggling to make the world a better place, and shove it right up your ass.
You got the downvotes but not from me! Fuck these people. They’re so fucking dumb it’s painful.
Fuck the Republicans and fuck the Democrats, sure. But voting is about politics, not making a personal moral statement. That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck and would have been self defeating in every election since George Washington. Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut. Effective activism is about winning what you can, taking the hits, and showing up to do it again and again.
Voters who had a choice between two candidates that both support a genocide are not responsible for that genocide. I know a few things about moral reasoning, and no moral system I’m aware of would ever come to such an insane conclusion.
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We have a FPTP election system. Third parties aren’t a real thing. In my 50+ years on this planet, third parties have only had a minor impact once, and it was deeply antithetical to their goal.
How the fuck is a third party strategy not “electoralism”? You must realize that both dominant parties encourage third parties when it benefits them. The greens are almost entirely funded by conservatives.
50 years is, what, 12 major election cycles. So that’s your sample size - twelve.
Here’s a larger sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election#Popular_vote_results
Let’s go back to even just 1900. 1912 our first major upset - 41.8%, 27%, 23.2%, and 6%. Looks nothing like a 50/50 split. 1920 had a huge landslide, 60%/34.2%, and 3.4% behind that. 1924? 54%, 28.8%, 16.6%. More landslides through FDR’s term. Fast forward to 1968 - American Independent party with a staggering 13.5% of the vote. 6.6% in 1980. 18.9% in 1992. Only since then - namely, since Bush v. Gore, even though Bush pretty objectively lost the election both in EC and popular (besides Supreme Court intervention), have we really settled into the “lesser of two evils” mentality and been blaming third parties for any Republican victory, with the mindset we MUST vote for Democrats. And yet our methods of popular organization have become dramatically more sophisticated! We have instantaneous global communication, social networks, you name it. So what the fuck is going on? IT’S LITERALLY THE “LESSER OF TWO EVILS” MENTALITY ITSELF.
You are shooting yourselves in the foot, voting for Democrats and ruling out any real change, when the Democrats are so openly genocidal and corrupt. Even the Republicans, for their absolute lack of insight and vision and understanding, are able to perceive something’s wrong with the Democrat politicians, and that’s why Trump is able to sweep them all up into his camp. This has literally enabled the rise of fascism and the defeat of real populism (like your Eugene Debs figures back in the early 1900s). You run something absolutely uninspiring and awful and genocidal, among a voter base that’s SUPPOSED to be the one that’s more motivated by justice and equality, and they predictably lose. I don’t particularly like Bernie Sanders, but the Dem party wouldn’t even let him run, they ran Hillary instead, and bam, Trump won. How many times do you need to see this play out?
The last time we got a shake up in the two party system was with the civil war. Even then, we didn’t get three parties, we just replaced one party with another. 1912 was a notable but unrepeatable exception, but not an “upset”. We still elected one of the two major parties, and four years later it was back to Republicans and Democrats. It’s also notable that Taft and Roosevelt were both Republicans, so Roosevelt running as a Progressive meant that they split the vote and Democrats won with only 41.8% of the vote. Republicans were the left party at the time, so the left split the vote and got a conservative. Your exception shows exactly why third party runs are boneheaded.
Any third party that had the means to run a viable third party candidate would easily be capable of running an inside strategy to replace the Democratic establishment. Unlike the fantasy of a third party approach, that strategy has worked in the past. If there aren’t enough Democratic voters who are pissed enough at the Democratic establishment to do a takeover of the party, then there definitely aren’t enough to win a third party strategy.
It’s a protest vote and not a serious one. Nobody is seriously voting for third parties. What a great democracy we have!
Fuck this country I hope it burns.
That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck
Your tired analysis fails to take into account the voting behavior of the ENTIRE POPULATION. You myopically focus on a prefabricated two choices available to each individual in the society, assuming the rest of the society is a GIVEN, and then it follows from that faulty premise that one of those two choices is strategic. But you fail to take into account that the entire society is free to vote for anyone. The fact that they can demonstrates the simple fact that IT’S A BAD IDEA TO VOTE FOR A BAD CANDIDATE.
Well, you go ahead and convince the ENTIRE POPULATION to vote third party and I will absolutely eat my words.
I’m just curious though, what do you plan to do differently from previous elections to achieve that aim? It’s not like this is a new argument, and it’s never worked before. I’ve jumped on that wagon myself in my more naive days, and the ENTIRE POPULATION wasn’t interested in playing along. What changed?
Do you understand it’s a cognitive bias that you expect a third party to fight to secure every single vote, but the two primary parties just get every other vote by default? Do you understand that that cognitive bias is the reason the population is voting for those two parties, out of the self-defeating mentality that no one else better can win? Do you understand that it’s the people who have actually clearly understood this problem that refuse to keep reinforcing the problem by voting for them? Your message is basically, “we’re all doing it wrong? fine, convince 330 million people that they’re all doing it wrong.” Are you planning on helping? Or are you just going to try to shut it down? All I can do is sit here and say that that millions of people are engaging in a demonstrably irrational behavior. The ten sane people in Nazi Germany couldn’t stop the genocide, because of the millions of people who had their own stupid fucking arguments for going with the flow.
Your bipartisan support is of a genocidal empire with victims in the tens to hundreds of millions. Are the two main parties literally identical? No. Are they both so incredibly evil that you shouldn’t vote for either? Yes. You want to call it a “wasted vote” not voting for a group of terrorists holding the world hostage with nuclear weapons, well, you’re an idiot.
it’s a cognitive bias
No, it’s game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it’s not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn’t new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren’t proposing anything new.
That’s only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it’s a cognitive bias, because you’re, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?
There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the “lesser of two evils” mentality, or whatever else. It’s not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It’s that it’s a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.
Then there is the problem of corruption
Yes, that is a fundamental problem with “representative democracy”. I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is bitch and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I’m complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you’re blue in the face, but you’re literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn’t cherry picking. Sorry.
the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.
No, it’s not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don’t, because you can’t.
I’m not being “defeatist”, I’m saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it’s a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
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Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut.
When was the last time Republicans compromised leftward in any meaningful way?
The politicians? Top of my head, stimulus payments.
The voters? Trump’s suckers agree with whatever Trump says, so their entire political view is compromise, if not complete capitulation. Traditional Republicans compromised left by voting for a populist candidate, though they probably understood he was full of shit.
So Republicans moved to the left by… doing what Trump wanted?
God damn, just say you can’t think of anything because it’s clear you can’t.
Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.
That’s not a compromise leftward on the part of the Republican party.
Because Republicans don’t need to compromise. They sit there and let Democrats move toward them, secure in the knowledge that Democrats will be like “Look at this glorious bipartisan compromise!”
When only one side is compromising it’s called capitulation.
Why ask for examples if your just going to reject them on principle?
On it’s face, the idea that every Republican politician is right of every one of their voters on every issue is ridiculous. Republican voters, like all voters, compromise.
I hope you’re happy with the Trump administration you helped elect. If you end up in a camp, you can impress everyone with your moral purity
Oh look it’s a mask off liberal
oh look, it’s someone who uses liberal as a slur, much like the trump people you align with
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Triggered much?
You are the one here who’s concerned with imaginary moral purity. I am the one concerned with the actual consequences of this system. I will not take lessons in morality from somebody on the wrong side of a genocide.
lol
If you end up in a camp, you can impress everyone with your moral purity
No one’s going to trust centrists with their escape plans.
I agree with everything you wrote except having a problem with happenings in Gaza. Israel isn’t being aggressive enough
Well, that is disgusting and shows the gaping hole where your conscience is supposed to be.
It’s not just them. I feel the same way about every Church in America too and cheered when Canadians were burning them down and laughed when Notre Dame caught on fire.
Start from scratch with your idea of how morality works, because what you’re working with now is fucking awful.
I have two fists
Bruh that’s crazy about that dude’s virginity
I’m so confused, why is that there.
It looks to me like a joke about not getting laid.
But it’s extra silly because it’s a dude talking about his virginity growing back, when afaik that phrase probably referred to a woman’s hymen growing back after a long dry spell (which would also have been a joke).
I’m actually less concerned with the OP but more with how George Takei feels the need to double down on it
George Takei and his family were literally in a camp when he was a child, because all Japanese living in America were “a threat” during WWII.
He understandably has no chill when fascism is involved.
Okay but again, I’m not referring to the the white text but the part of his virginity growing back
What?
I said “I’m actually less concerned with the OP but more with how George Takei feels the need to double down on it”
This elevator is a little crowded, I see why you couldn’t hear me
I like you
I was thinking that too, but I think it’s because the og post is Twitter and George Takei is BlueSky. He just wanted to credit the original post.
Yes either way, I would like to know why Takei is thinking his virginity is growing back
I think it’s a reference about how fucked we are about to be. Like Madonna sang… like a virgin.
I think if it’s growing back that’s a sign of very little fucking going on. And I’m not sure which Madonna song you’re referring to, but if it’s American Pie by Don McLean, that song is about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly.
Tankies and their fucking accelerationism.
Capitalists and their fucking accelerationism.
Why not both?
Tankies in America are inconsequential and don’t exist in real life in any kind of meaningful number. They’re online edgelords who need to touch grass.
Capitalists have all of the power.
If they’re too insignificant to listen to, they’re too insignificant to blame.
Won’t be 4 years.
Right, this is definitely going to be a life sentence.
Are you implying this doesn’t have an effect on THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD???
No, but at least you guys have your own (hopefully) functioning independent governments to at least try to blunt some of the damage/issues or come together with each other
The best we got are the state governments, but what they can do is… limited
Honestly, I’m afraid of the upcoming election in my country as well. Trump is a symptom of a global phenomenon
global phenomenon
A while back I read an article that posited that we might be in conservatisms last throes before death, that last burst of energy animals sometimes get before whimpering out.
I like to think that’s the real global phenomenon and it’s a matter of getting worse before it gets better
Let’s hope we get to socialism after this barbarism
Disagree, it’s a reaction to social change and it’s obvious global neoliberalism leads to increasingly worse living standards in the west as the imperial core gets hollowed out by capitalists which is why people are resorting to conservatives and fascists instead. Not because things will be better under them but because most have only the choice between liberals, neoliberals, and conservatives all of whom are in service to capital. Conservatives at least get to message “look at the good old days let’s return” (nevermind the good old days were when minorities and women knew their place)
We still have to put our foot down and maybe double tap it to the face or it could bounce back.
That is a bunch of wishful thinking.
Maybe that’s true, but it looks like neoliberalism beat conservatism to the gallows. Maybe conservatism burns itself out and we can finally get to something better.
