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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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politics
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I voted for Harris. I voted for Biden. I voted for Clinton.
I still wouldn't warn a single one of them if they were about to get hit by a bus.
Its harm reduction. They don't solve anything. They just keep us treading water sinking slowly whereas Republicans start taking a hammer to the hull to open up new holes.
Those are all neoliberals, nothing good would come of them being president, and the voting results speak for themselves. Neoliberalism wont work in this country anymore, if you want to beat republicans, elect progressives.
American Democracy in a nutshell. You get two choices, they're both awful for different reasons. One of them wants to see you executed for your religious beliefs/sexual preferences/nation of origin. The other is continent to sell bunker buster bombs to some raving psychotic mass murderers overseas. Nobody is going to do shit about climate change, though, so we're all on the clock in the long run.
It increasingly feels like the closest thing to harm reduction the US achieved was the time Trump fucked up his COVID response and a bunch of his senior leadership choked to death on their own lung fluid.
There’s only one man who’s done any meaningful harm reduction in your country and your judicial system is charging him with terrorism.
I generally agree with your point, but the MIC is a bad example; both parties are equally happy selling bombs to murderers.
There was roughly 20 different elected positions on my ballot.
The real problem with American politics is everyone is so focused on the POTUS that they ignore the politicians who have an actual measurable effect on their quality of life.
I challenge anyone to look up your local town hall and see when the next city council meeting is. Go to it and see what they talk about and vote on. Notice the other people who go.
Many cities have public meetings for police oversite too. They're even less attended than city council meetings
Another massive problem is the voting system which could barely be designed better for forcing a two party system on you. There is no room for someone getting 30% of the vote and of course they should then have about that much influence.
I've been to a few city council meetings. When you're there as part of an organization lobbying for a particular policy, you can at least see the terms of the debate and understand who to lobby, what the blockades are, and why a seemingly good-idea isn't getting through. But if you're just sitting in on meetings, its like tuning into CSPAN at a random point in the day. You've got no historical context. You don't know who you're listening to or why they're talking. And there's a ton of maneuvering going on behind the scenes that you can't glimpse because you're not really a part of it.
Add to the problem, a lot of people aren't really wedded to their communities. I live in a neighborhood in which people move in and out every five years or so, chasing a better job or looking for better schools or trying to find more garage space for their giant cars or cashing out on a sudden jump in their home price. Trying to get them engaged in a fight over the ten-year-plan for mass transit is basically impossible because most of them won't be here in ten years.
I don't say this to discourage anyone from going. But this isn't something you can just bootstrap your way into. You really need a community of more knowledgeable and engaged people to introduce you to what is going on and why. Otherwise, you're just listening to a couple of people argue over the preferred way to renovate municipal drainage on the opposite side of town for an hour.
I gotta keep moving because my rent keeps going up. Let's hope I find that cheaper basement
Herman Cain approves this message.
The democratic process doesn't start on election day.
Yeah, it starts when someone has a billion dollars and wants to influence government.
10 million Democrats x $100/each - $1 billion
People are more powerful than they think.
I'm not giving another dime to the Democratic Party so it's more like 9,999,999 Democrats.
I wouldn't even be in the party if we didn't have closed primaries in my state.
fair enough.
1 million American leftists x $100 to Bernie Sanders or AOC in the primaries = $100 million
and
1 million American leftists x $100 to Green party = $100 million
I already donated a hundred bucks to Bernie.
It didn't work.
Yes give them more money, they're doing such great things with the money that's already given to them.
It started well into the election cycle after Biden refused to honor his one term pledge.
No time for a primary now! Oops didn't mean to! /$
First Past The Post voting has got to go, or else the USA is toast. A shame the democratic party believes themselves to be more important then the country itself.
Harm reduction is bad?
Obviously, it's not ideal, but one has to act according to the real life conditions... And in 2024, our only two options were "harm reduction," and literal fascism with literal concentration camps.
Fuck you if you didn't choose harm reduction.
Neoliberalism and harm reduction wont work anymore. What the fuck do you think America has been doing the past three decades? If you want to beat republicans, you need to elect progressives, otherwise fascism will keep on rising.
To be fair to them, we're just delaying collapse. It is a choice.
I agree with them that there's no saving this constitutional structure. In one sense it's cowardly, because there's no escape from this capitalist slaughterhouse hellscape without collapse. Collapse is necessary. Trump will certainly usher that in faster.
But Im too much of a softy to let the blood that always has to spill be on my hands.
This country was irreparable since Reagan, a zombie nation oligarch piggie bank. My vote was a cowardly one for a few more years of quiet orderly slaughter, NOT peace.
But we lost, so the slaughter will be loud and bigger than it's ever been, so maybe it's time for revolution if we want our kids to have anything left.
Because in 4 years the DNC WILL anoint someone to meet Trump's economy in the middle, and even I may not be able to stomach voting for that.
Kamala was in a weird place as well.
Normally it's easy for people to hold their noses for an incumbent. But if Kamala won. Shed run again in 2028.
Which would mean from 2012 to 2032, there wouldn't have been a fair Dem primary.
20 fucking years...
Party leaders don't understand that when you take primaries away, it hurts general turnout. Because regardless of who wins, the primary is the time for the eventual candidate to get their finger on the pulse and see what voters want.
Which is reliably that the Dem candidate moves left.
Without a primary they move right and turnout goes down.
We have literally decades of data that shows this, but it's not what the donors want and the present DNC wants donations more than votes.
Hopefully Winkler gets chair in a few months and that changes.
Some More News did a good summary of how the Democrats win when they have a primary - and move to the left - but lose when they don't.
The DNC would rather have Trump as POTUS than Sanders or AOC.
With Trump, the bribe money keeps flowing to both party machines, They are both paid to keep this sociopath owned economy safe from the people.
AOC voted to protect the rail corporations from a union strike.
I think there's some truth in thinking that continuing to elect milquetoast corporatist neoliberal candidates just builds up more extremism and discontent as people continue to suffer under option A of 2 - so when eventually a neocon breaks through they tend to be bonkers. It's why I'm so fucking disappointed in Starmier as he's clearly going to do fuck all and likely hand the next election to the torries.
That said, that's a pretty fucking abstract view and there's always a chance we get lucky. I voted for Harris but I was really hoping we'd get Senator Harris who actually gave a shit and, even if I knew for certain she'd be underwhelming I'd still fucking vote for her because Trump was worse on every issue and would directly cause a lot of additional human suffering. Women would be forced into unwanted pregnancies, trans people would be suppressed or worse - deaths would come from increased incidents of suicide and self-medication, and, lastly, (and I know a fuck ton of pushback on this point here) more Palestinians would die as Trump accelerated genocide.
So yea, I really regret that we are constantly dealt such bad hands but harm reduction is always a good thing to pursue in the absence of better actions.
Seriously though, when Biden dropped out fuck absolutely everyone who defended the DNC anointing Harris instead of running a snap primary.
If you're only voting for harm reduction year after year and doing nothing to try and organize grassroots opposition to the lesser evil, yes constantly voting harm reduction is bad. It's how you allow lesser evils to grow into the larger evils of the current DNC, who care more about fundraising than winning.
The thing is that this is everyone in America. The left has practically no grassroots organization and expects online complaints about the DNC to magically accomplish something, and the right has astroturfed horse shit that that is on board with whatever the corporatist GOP wants to do.
That been my realization. I voted for harm reduction for what 12 year now like a lot of us and have little to show for it if not less. Yes the other side is a factor but they also seem more successful in their braindead idiot agenda too.
...thirty years of choosing harm reduction brought us to this point...
...i held my nose and voted against fascism, but if you want to blame someone, blame the f*cking fascists and blame the thirty years of harm reduction which enabled them: pluralities win, that's how american democracy works...