Signtist

The whole lesson here if we live to learn it should be that even when politics are boring, they’re still important. When all you see are old white dudes, it’s the people you elected that put them there - not the presidents themselves, but everyone else on the ballot in your local and state elections that you probably never even thought about, much less made an informed vote for.

If all your ever did was think about your presidential vote - or didn’t even bother to do that - then you specifically voted for the status quo, namely, the old white dudes. If you want change during the boring times you need to go and make it with your vote. I get it - I was the same “what’s the point?” voter, but I’m not anymore, and I’d hope anyone who lived through this will have grown that much at least.

Seems to me like he thought the pallet jack was meant to work like a spatula to scoop things up off the ground, and tried to force the box against something so it would stop sliding around and get on the jack.

Get this… it used to be freezing… during the day too!!

Sadly, in my experience the default stance is “if they broke the law, they only have themselves to blame.”

There’s no middle ground where we can minimize the decent into enslavement by biding our time until the revolution comes.

Nobody is “biding their time” for a revolution; we’re getting angrier and angrier by the day - it’s nearly inevitable. Unless a political change happens, and quickly, it’s coming. But still, it takes time, and voting will happen in the meantime. To ignore the entirety of the voting system simply because it’s going to be overthrown anyway is dumb - these is a modicum of good we can do by making sure the country is in the least-terrible position that we can when we finish preparing (note: not waiting) for the revolution, and it’s pretty clear that one side is better than the other.

However, the original poster I responded to has made me aware that the 2018 election in Mexico was actually a lot more similar to a US election than I first thought, and it’s made me wonder if rallying people around a new party may actually be a viable choice. I’m still looking into it, but there may be a 3rd way to get ourselves out of this. Regardless, ignoring tools at our disposal simply because they won’t fix things on their own is not going to make things any better. Even if the world is only a fraction of a percent better with a democrat in charge over a republican, it’s a better choice than nothing. Hopefully a 3rd party option is more viable than I initially thought, though.

Damn, I looked into it further, and you’re absolutely right. I knew it was an upset win, and when I saw that there were 4 major parties in the election, I dismissed it as a more variable political system, but it’s first-past-the-post, just like the US. This will definitely change my thought process on what our chances of making real current-day changes to our political landscape would be. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and for powering through my hardheadedness.

The message isn’t “Democrats cannot be trusted to represent our interests, they are our opposition to radical change……” it’s “Nobody within our government gives a shit about our interests.” And they won’t until we get new blood in, but that doesn’t happen at the top, it happens at the bottom, and we force it to the top through years and years of consistent voting. The liberals who make up the democratic party aren’t going anywhere until they’re replaced, but even their replacements are liberals. Again, we need to change the bottom to change the top.

But, what do we do as we’re getting to the top? Do we just abstain from voting and let the Republicans pump more and more money into ICE for the next decade or two? Or do we vote for the weak, spineless liberals who won’t fix anything, but also won’t make things as bad as the Republicans would? Or do we vote for the 3rd party voters who 90% of the country hasn’t even heard of, much less intends to vote for? We’ve seen what happens when people do that, and it’s just as bad as voting for the Republicans themselves.

So please, tell me who I should actually vote for for president in the coming years, between the times where positive change hopefully starts to grow in the local elevations, but before it can reach up to the top and actually put forward a viable presidential candidate that even the people who aren’t paying attention will vote for. Because the people whose family members got carted off to the next Alligator Auschwitz will want to know if we let the tyrants in on a technicality, or if we at least voted for their asshole younger brothers instead, since nobody else stood a chance of being in charge otherwise in the meantime.

I don’t care if some liberal, who is never going to change one way or another, gets a big head because people voted for them, I care if they’re going to be as bad as their republican counterpart during the time it takes for us to make the changes that we need to make that will actually change our government for the better, because the government itself is never going to do so.

Democrats in office right now will never, never put up a fight. Ever. And neither will republicans. People can scream all they like - nearly all high-level American politicians today got into politics for their own benefit, and are happy to continue receiving “lobbying” money in exchange for the destruction of the world. Vote for them, don’t vote for them, they don’t care.

The lesser evil proclamations are not at all about reversing the trend, because it won’t be reversed. The only thing that will reverse the trend within this generation will be outright revolution. Voting for the lesser evil is about minimizing the damage in the meantime while we organize the revolution.

If we decide to go the route of changing the democratic party slowly from within, like with Mamdani, then it will also work, but only by the time local city council and mayoral candidates advance in the government enough to become presidential candidates, which will be decades. And even in that case, we need to minimize the damage to make sure the country survives until then.

The democratic party won’t ever put forth a leftist candidate until there are literally no other candidates for it to choose from, so we either wait until we’ve swapped everyone out, or we revolt.

Nobody’s waiting. People won’t stop worshiping the media if we just wait for them to stop. We have to galvanize the younger generation into being interested and engaged in politics so that they don’t become just like the lost-cause bloat of current voters. It’s a lot of work, and it will take decades, but yes, it can work. In fact, it’s been working. While everyone I know over 50 thinks that Trump is just a normal president, everyone I know under 20 recognizes him as the tyrant he is. Soon those younger minds will outnumber the older ones who think it’s still business as usual, but that shift still does need to change for us to have a chance at winning a presidential election with an actual leftist.

Mexico was in a tough enough spot that even the older people demanded better, but life’s still pretty good for the baby boomer generation that dominates the American voting pool. They don’t have a reason to protest and organize through tik-tok for change, they like their life and want it to stay the same, government and all. We need our younger generation who, like those in Mexico, only see a bleak future for themselves under the current government, and will do what’s necessary to change it.

But if we’re fixing the system from within the system, that change will only come when one of the 2 parties is indeed leftist. Mexico has a multi-party system, enacted by a government who listened to the people enough to enact that policy, but we don’t - without changing the entire system, we’ll still need to fix one of the current parties to the point where they put forward a real leftist candidate before we’ll see one win democratically. That happens from the bottom, with local elections like the one for Mamdani. Otherwise, we’ll need to overthrow the system to see a leader of our country as good as Mexico’s anytime soon.

Ah, I see. You think that democrats will change if we just stop voting for them. They wont. As I said, they’re essentially just Republican lite. We’ll either have 2 parties that are almost the same, or the democratic party will simply dissolve and we’ll just have 2 identical republicans running for office. Either way, yes, we will have to bring about change with organized resistance.

However, in the case that the ruling class still allows for the republican-lite party, it’s better to let the democrats keep only mostly destroying the world instead of letting the republicans openly see how quickly they can tear everything down, because that leaves less rebuilding we’ll need to do when the time comes for that. Refusing to vote for the lesser evil is like refusing to eat what meager rations you get from your jailers as you work toward your jailbreak - you’d be a fool to deny it simply because it’s part of the system you plan to dismantle, because your task will be harder for it.

Oh, so you do think we can overcome the media? I see. From your comment about how most Americans don’t even know about Mexico’s recent election, much less care, I thought you understood that we’re much less tapped into the state of the world than any other country. I wholeheartedly believe that we are far more reliant on the media to do our thinking for us than any other country save for maybe North Korea or China, but even those would be a stretch. I don’t think a success in a country like Mexico, whose citizens clearly have the ability to look beyond the media, could be recreated here, in a country whose citizens would rather cover their ears than listen to news from elsewhere in the world.

I agree that we need to change our mindset, but I also believe that the Americans who are already slaves to the media will never change their ways, and so long as they’re around, the media will control our elections. We need to wait until those people are gone, and hopefully replace them over time with people who are more mindful of politics. Then maybe we can overcome the government through democracy instead of violence, but even if it works it won’t be happening any time soon.

I don’t understand your point. Voting is not a form of protest or revolution - you either overthrow the government, or you don’t; voting is just the thing you do in the meantime to hopefully keep living to eventually overthrow the government. If the system worked, sure, voting would keep it working, but thinking of voting as a way to change the system at this point is like thinking an oil change will fix a broken engine. I vote for the lesser evil not because I accept them or want them to be in charge, but because I know the person I want in charge will never be placed in charge by the current system. I advocate for revolution because I know we need it, and that the system cannot be fixed in my lifetime without it, but voting is an entirely separate thing, and can only be used as a tool to keep the world from falling apart quite as quickly as it would under the greater evil.

You seem to understand that the vast majority of Americans simply vote for what they see in the media, meaning that only a candidate backed by the media can win, and you seem to understand that we can’t shift the media with our current government, but you don’t seem to understand that, given those 2 facts, there is no way for us to recreate the phenomenon seen in other countries with a larger proportion of people willing to look outside of their televisions and smartphones.

For a 3rd party candidate to win a modern-day American presidential election, either the media would have to validate them, or tens of millions of Americans would have to, in unison, spontaneously decide not to follow the media that they trust implicitly without question.

Correct, which is why the 3rd part is itself unrealistic. We need to change things from the ground-up at a local level, which will take decades, or overthrow everything and start over, which will lead to a huge amount of deaths regardless of whether or not we even win the battle. Regardless, to win the presidential election with a 3rd party right now, we need the media, and that’s not going to happen, so to put your vote in that hole is the same as not voting.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. Our media has the vast majority of the voters’ sole attention - they don’t know and don’t care that other options exist. If a presidential candidate doesn’t have equal media coverage to the other 2 parties, they immediately lose more Americans than they would need to win the election.

I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance - it doesn’t hold enough power for you to use it that way anymore. Your acceptance or rejection of the system comes from your actions outside of the polling place, in the form of protests and what inevitably comes after protests if they’re ignored for long enough.

A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse. It’s like the trolley problem - there’s no real 3rd track right now, no matter how much we want one. If we start building one now at the local level, maybe there will be one for someone later, but we’ve gotta make our own lever choice without it for now.

Because the system currently only supports 2 parties for president. We would need current politicians to be selfless enough to make the necessary changes that would allow for a 3rd party to receive enough funding and media coverage for the vast majority of the American voters - who pay no attention at all to politics - to hear about them. Our politicians only work for themselves, and have no reason to work against their own interests by introducing a 3rd party - hell, they’ve almost condensed down to a single party, but at least one side of it is still keeping up appearances enough to only terrorize its people a little bit so that they can say they’re better than the other guys.

Presidential voting is just trying to use the system to change the system, which only works when the system itself works. The current system is broken to the point that presidential voting won’t fix it - the best we can do is make sure the lesser of the evils wins until we can garner enough support for an actual overthrowing of the system, then begin the work to make one that would allow for politicians that actually care about us. A presidential vote to make actual change is a wasted vote, because a vote no longer holds that much power in America. The best it can do on its own is hold back the greater evil.

For local elections you should absolutely vote for the most progressive person you can, because the voters that don’t pay attention don’t even show up to those votes, making them much more volatile to the point where a true leftist can win. Maybe we’d even be able to get a new generation of politicians to change the system from the ground up over the course of several decades, if the country lasts that long. But the presidential election is far too padded by people who would vote for their party’s candidate even if they killed their own mother - it can’t suddenly change, not in its current state.