Neither party represents my interests and, as you've seen, the "lesser evil" argument doesn't motivate me in the slightest. If you want me to vote for Dems then you'll have to make them worth voting for and stop acting like they can coast to victory on fear of the Republicans alone.

I'm aware of FPTP and its mathematical implications, our country is designed to provide only the appearance of democracy while actually limiting choice to those candidates the parties deem inoffensive to their campaign financiers. And we're stuck with them unless you can convince the two-party state to abolish the leverage it has over third parties, so stop acting like they'll let you vote your way out of this situafion.

Real change would require a political revolution, and I've long since lost my faith that Americans would build something less fascist given the chance.

[–] Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And there it is. The dumbest thing I'll read all day.

Let me know when the 2 party stranglehold allows you to vote it out. Until then you'll sit high atop your bullshit mountain preaching on the internet, whining on and on about how things should be.

Meanwhile, completely oblivious that you and people like you are exactly the reason why we don't have enough voting power to enact real change.

You don't even irritate me. I pity you.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Let me know when the 2 party stranglehold allows you to vote it out.

You're the one insisting I don't have a choice here. Why should anyone bother helping reinforce a system designed to disenfranchise them? To keep the "wrong people" from taking power, as if that wasn't already the case?

If that sounds like Accelerationism to you, then you're reading me correctly. Preservation of the intolerable status quo only delays and inflames the inevitable upheaval.

Meanwhile, completely oblivious that you and people like you are exactly the reason why we don't have enough voting power to enact real change.

Oblivious?

No, I'm counting on it. The Democrats won't change unless they have to, and people like me are the ones they need to change for. People like you, who "vote blue no matter who", can be safely ignored by party leadership since they know you'll vote for them anyway.

[–] Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well unlike you suggest, I don't vote blue no matter who, I vote blue because the other choice is demonstrably worse.

You wax eloquent about how things need to change and so you choose to do nothing, but what happens when you recruit enough lefties to your side that the right is able to establish the equivalent of a dictatorship via voter suppression, coups, etc? What then? At that point you are 100% fucked.

Are you one of these idiots who actively want a civil war? Because if so you can give that idea up, it isn't going to happen.

You are the equivalent of an old man yelling at clouds to change their shape.

You say nothing ever changes, but it already has! Biden, while being not nearly the lefty I would like him to be, has done a fantastic job compared to what I expected. It may or may not occur to you that Biden so far has governed much more left that Obama did.

Things do change, they just take time.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 1 points 11 months ago

Well unlike you suggest, I don't vote blue no matter who, I vote blue because the other choice is demonstrably worse.

I'm sure the party cares deeply about this justification, since that seems to be all they're running on these days.

I remember back in 1984 when such a strategy was considered comical:

    It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
    "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
    "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
    "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
    "I did," said Ford. "It is."
    "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
    "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
    "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
    "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
    "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
    "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

-Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4)

You wax eloquent about how things need to change and so you choose to do nothing

Says the guy who thinks that repeatedly voting in a game that was rigged from the start isn't "doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result".

what happens when you recruit enough lefties to your side that the right is able to establish the equivalent of a dictatorship via voter suppression, coups, etc?

Non-fascists will be forced to accept that working within a system that's designed to disenfranchise them can never produce a democratic government and join with the anti-fascists. The dictatorship is subsequently overthrown by popular action at the cost of many lives (which likely includes my own as a nonbinary person with left-wing politics). This creates space for a second constitutional convention to fundamentally reform the law of the land.

At that point you are 100% fucked.

We've been 100% fucked for longer than you've been alive, the only question is whether or not you're comfortable with the current rate of fuckery and what you're willing to risk to change it.

Are you one of these idiots who actively want a civil war?

Lol, of course not. I have merely accepted that nothing short of a second American Revolution could overthrow the two-party system and that things will definitely get worse before they can get better.

Hell, I predicted this way back in November 2016. Trump's win would galvanize the Democrats in 2020, and the subsequent lack of meaningful change depresses the vote enough that 2022 and 2024 go to the republicans. Trump then punishes his percieved enemies while the Democrats continue to chase Republican voters to the right, further fracturing their own left-wing base.