Citizens of the US are really screwed, with a pseudo-democracy where they can only choose between conservatives or fascists, apart from practically half of the population who show that Descartes was wrong, because they exist but they don’t think.
The US has never been a country that’s good or fair. It’s only very slowly gotten a little better through the sweat and blood of good people.
If we want it to get better it’s going to be a lot of difficult and painstaking work.
I mean, that’s a weird-ass AI prompt. But if fascism wins and you voted third party, yes - it’s partly* your fault unless you’re too stupid to understand how first past the post voting works.
*conditionals against massive fascist party majority states notwithstanding.
Keep typing. You’re making my point for me.
If your goal is to have a third option to vote for, the best way to help is to support independent candidates on the right as well. If the fascist vote is split (say between Trump and Liz Cheney) then a vote for (Cornell West for example) is less likely to be a vote for fascism.
Third party candidates will never be the answer. They exist only to dilute resistance. The answer is to raise awareness and outrage until it can’t be ignored.
While I agree third party candidates are not really the solution, what exactly is rage and outrage that can’t be ignored gonna do? How is that gonna change things? Do you think the lawmakers and people in power and gonna just gonna fix the system that put them in power just cause some people got mad? More importantly changing all that would take time, way more time than we have before the next election, so what do you recommend we are suppose to do right now?
Please be a bit more specific than “get mad”, cause trust me, a lot of people have been mad for a long time, just getting mad doesn’t fix anything
We were on the verge of forcing real change before the neolibs convinced the middle class that they won by electing Biden. The people in the streets fighting cops is always the beginning of change. Spreading information, and not accepting the premise that Biden is the solution is how we get people back in the streets.
If one is a leftist and wants a third party just so we’ll be represented at all, then supporting right wing independents could backfire. Their corrupt corporate moderates are costing the right just as much support as they cost us. There’s a lot of religious folks out there who - if united - would usher in the Handmaid’s Tale.
Ross Perot came very close to actually winning. In today’s climate, a far right candidate just might.
Just curious… In what way did Ross Perot come close to winning? I see that he got 8% of the popular vote in 1996 but I’m not seeing that he ever got an electoral vote.
In that he got a large percentage of the total votes.
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To be fair the GOP would happily fund it too
Hey, only if it doesn’t conflict with Putin’s goals.
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How can anyone think that Trump wouldn’t support it. If anything, he would call the IDF a bunch of pussies for not bombing Gaza even harder.
That’s not the point. People aren’t saying that they’d rather have Trump in charge. The point is things will never get better if everyone keeps unquestioningly giving their votes to the Democrats regardless of how little the democrats represent their interests. The only real way most people have of making a political party change is by withholding their votes until that party changes in order to regain the votes.
Trump would denounce Israel, even as a lie, to win the White House.
Your options:
- Genocide overseas & decent domestic policies
- Genocide overseas & Genocide domestically
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This is not a winnable situation. This is a two party system with a lesser of two evils option.
But we cannot consistently remain on the edge forever. If we pass over that line. And we have trump next year, it will be our last election.
We’ll either have a civil war and finally revise the system or end up like Russia.
Alternatively we can stay on the edge a little longer and build up a different strategy. Maybe A third party that only runs non-president candidates nationwide. Running in off elections and non-presidential yearsto gain seats and national trust. Maybe reforming local laws to make PACS less effective to avoid situations like the current one.
It’ll be slow and not ideal, but it’s a better chance at improving things then flipping the switch and having the dictatorship now.
Either way Palestinians die because we don’t get a say in that. And to end off this little rant.
Biden is enabling the genocide because his PACs have his hands tied. Trump would be cheering on the genocide because his PACS and his base would support him for it.
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Theres the Fascist who will keep the veil of democracy on and avoid total outright Fascism or the Fascist who will burn democracy to the ground and have outright Fascism.
Voting for anyone else is at best throwing your vote in the garbage and at worst voting for the greater of two evils.
This was never an issue of “Voting for the good guy” that hasn’t been an option for as long as I have been alive. This is an issue of biding time to build up a strong enough third party, and we don’t even have a strong enough third party to have a presence in congress or the senate
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But there have been active courses of action.
The Presidency is one person, with increasingly too much power.
Unions have been exploding in popularity, various local elections have been swinging farther left than the standard democrat playbook.
The people are not voting democrat because they are content with them, they’re voting democrat because there is not another viable option.
It needs to start local and grow. We need a proper left-wing party, if we can ever get organized enough to do such a thing rather than relying on what already exists.
And as I said, I think the best course of action is a measured approach. Local Elections, Off-year elections and non-presidential elections. Grow in numbers, gain public confidence and start snowballing.
The reason why third parties are progressively weakening is because of a lack of faith, and third party’s consistent decimation in the presidential is a big part of it.
Its counter intuitive, but voting third-party hurts third parties in the long run if you focus on them primarily during presidential elections.
I’m not the standard “Oh the third party will never win type.” I’m actively against trying to run before we can walk.
Confidence is a big deal in elections. It’s more obvious in Primaries. If people see a candidate they like in the Primaries, but they don’t think they can win against the opposition candidate, they will not vote for the candidate they like. They will vote for the candidate that they have the most confidence in even if they don’t like that candidate.
We need to start a from the ground up political party that’s entire focus is to stay out of the view of presidential elections, We need to start focusing on bringing Ranked Choice Voting to as many locations as possible. And it will be a long process. But it’s far better than repeatedly doing the same thing every election cycle.
We always have the situation of 99% evil vs 100% evil both with a roughly 50/50 chance of winning and a selection of third party candidates who are decent but have 0 chance of winning.
Third party candidate loses, 99% or 100% evil wins. Third Party yet again becomes less relevant and less considered. Repeat. This cycle can only end if we stop focusing on the obvious losing strategy.
two things to consider
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voting harder wont actually stop fascism, the nazis took power with 30% of the vote
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not everyone gets a vote, myself included (not a citizen)
Eh, 30% in a parliamentary system is effectively the majority.
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…Memes?
Propaganda is a form of meme.
Why would we continue doing the exact same thing that has been time and time again proven to be a cheap bandaid that never addresses the issues? Fuck that. We have to try different ways of making progress in this country or we’re fucked. We’re not really a democratic country anyway. None of our representatives actually fight and do what we ask of them. So why fall for it again?
Bbbut we just need to buy time for [insert other thing that hasn’t been working]!
This is so good, did you make it?
I used Dall-E to generate the individual elements and put them together in Paint.NET. AI couldn’t understand the prompts I was using well enough to generate what I wanted.
Lol cool. It reminds me of 2016 when I checked the Republican party website and on the Donate page the background was a picture of Trump. Then I checked the Democratic party website and on the Donate page the background was a picture of Trump but with a scary red hue.
So, here’s a thought.
Instead of complaining, get active at a local level. Start doing shit, instead of complaining that other people should do shit. Be a local activist. Run for office. Work in person to persuade people. Get backing. Shake hands, kiss babies, meet people. And then? Vote for the best choices that you have.
If you want shit to change, you can’t complain on-line, you have to get off your ass and do something.
Tried that, all I got for my trouble was a total disillusionment with the American voting public.
Americans, generally, do not care, and I can’t convince them that they should.
You can. But you need to engage them one on one, and you need to find out what’s important to them, what frustrates them, and why. And then build on that. It takes empathy, and not faked empathy. It’s not a short conversation, like asking someone to donate to Greenpeace on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. It’s deep canvassing.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”
One-on-one might be effective, but it can’t scale. There’s no hope for the most heavily propagandized country on Earth that doesn’t start with an end to the incentive to lie for profit, I.E. Capitalism.
It does scale, but it doesn’t scale directly.
For the most part, people change based on relationships, not raw information. In general, you can’t counter a belief simply by presenting overwhelming information. (This is one of the only areas where Trump is a savant; he’s actively fostered a parasocial relationship with his cultists. They believe that they have a strong social relationship with him, so they’re inoculated against information that’s critical or negative of Trump.) What this means is that ideas can be contagious, and can spread through relationships. If you are able to use you relationship with your parents to help them understand why e.g. Trump is terrible for the country, then they can, in turn, spread that to their friends.
While I appreciate your desire to abolish capitalism, in the case of fascism, it’s not money, but power that’s at play. Even if you eliminated all profit motive, people would still shill for Trump because they think that they can get some kind of benefit that isn’t necessarily monetary.
Money and power are equivalent, hence my identification of the problem as Capitalism. Billionaire-owners who can afford to run a propaganda machine as a loss-leader are also to be abolished.
So, what EXACTLY do you think is my purpose in creating propaganda like this post?
And why do you assume I am not doing more?
Is it projection?
I assume that you aren’t doing more because almost all of the people bitching about the Dems only aligning with 95% of their views and therefore don’t vote for the Dems because they’re just as bad are accelerationists; they just want to make the system function even less well than it already does so that the whole things crashes and burns. Or, worse, in the case of someone like Jill Stein, are actively working against the interests of the country. Best case scenario? They’re speaking to an in-group to harden people in a position so that they’re less likely to engage with political opponents.
If you really, truly want things to change, you gotta do that shit on a 1:1 basis, in person. If you’re serious about changing people and fixing shit, I’d suggest looking at techniques of street epistemology and reading David McRaney’s “How Minds Change”.
Maybe you should stop arguing with your fantasies and projecting your frustrations so you can engage with people who are actually doing the work.
I do. Do you? Or do you think that ‘spreading propaganda’ is ‘work’?
It’s one of the things I do. You don’t know anything else about me, but you seem to think you do. All I know about you is that you can turn any subject into a conversation about yourself.
As an enlightened I must object.
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That image is more telling than you intended it to be.
A Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox
Maybe you’re misreading my intention. The image is supposed to convey that the Democrats use Republicans as a threat so they can stay in power, and the frayed rope represents them losing control. What did you think I was trying to say?
That’s what I thought you meant, the image implies they’re the same thing wearing different masks. The elephant is the weapon, the donkey is the one using it. In other words, a one party system pretending to be two.
What? I’m really not into us politics and also it’s pretty clear that the two party system is shit, but I never got the feeling that the two parties are similar in any way?
They have a lot more similarities than differences:
Yes, the Republican party is controlled by the Democrats so they can use them as a threat. Makes perfect sense now, there’s no other explanation.
The Democrats and Republicans work together to make sure you don’t have any meaningful choice. The Republicans don’t know that they’re being controlled because they have only the politics of hatred and destruction. Democrats keep them around for the appearance of civility.
Saying the Democrats control the republicans is silly but saying that they use the republicans as a threat to stay in power is indisputable. They literally funded pro trump candidates in republican primaries under the assumption they would be easier to beat in the general election.
That’s an actual liberal stance I see thrown around way too often so without a /s or some other explicit commentary I can understand why the post would be taken at face value or without assuming there’s an implied sentiment.
Maybe I put too much trust in the audience, but I wanted it to accurately depict liberal ideology while subtly undermining its hypocrisy.
I feel that, like if a lib had posted this then they’d have been sincere about it but it was you posting it so we all know what’s up
I think the frayed rope is the difference. A lib would put an unbreakable chain on the elephant.
