If trends continue, everything will be like it is now, but slightly worse in every way.

Jesus Christ do y’all come out of the woodwork for this. Blathering on about “great replacement” type shit, literally indistinguishable from the type of stuff you’d see on Fox News.

In fact, if you educated your racist ass about actual facts and history, there have been plenty of progressive Islamic societies, they just tended to get overthrown by the CIA. The more fundamentalist tendencies were promoted as more reliably anti-communist.

The notion that Western societies are in any danger whatsoever of turning to Islamic extremism is completely, laughably absurd, a racist, far-right conspiracy theory. The idea that women dressing a certain way would cause that is on par with people who say that gay people cause hurricanes.

Go back to Reddit with that shit, you are not welcome here.

If you mean it how I think you do, then you very much deserve it.

Crossing your arms and refusing to cooperate based on principle, and expecting others to do the same in the same way, is not the move right this second.

And it will never be “the right move this second” in any second for the next 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years following your path. Delaying something in politics is the same as opposing it.

We can still do all of the organizing and striking and educating while still doing our due diligence in making sure that the united right wing does not remain in power. It isn’t all or nothing.

Can you though? You’re tying yourself to the democratic party, which means that anything it does to fuck people (which it does constantly) will reflect on you and discredit your movement. You’re tying yourself to a sinking ship. And if you take the position that the status quo is acceptable, then why organize to change things at all? Voting is a hell of a lot safer and easier than organizing a strike. If it worked, there’d be little reason to engage in all that.

can we ACTUALLY make a 3rd party president, or can we work from the ground up, starting with local governments and communities

Nobody cares about any race except the presidency. That’s unfortunate but that’s the truth.

Nobody is forming a political identity around who they vote for for dogcatcher. They form their identities around the presidential candidate they vote for. The most expedient way to change people’s political identities is to challenge their presidential choice. The whole reason that this talking point about third parties “working their way up” through downballot races only exists because people don’t care what happens in them, it’s basically a way to exclude us from any relevant discussion.

Throwing votes at a 3rd party in the current state of US elections is wasting a vote because you were privileged enough to do so.

This is such a nonsensical talking point. “Privileged enough to do so?” That doesn’t even make sense. It’s not as if anyone is directly rewarded or punished for their vote. How does privilege enter into it in any way?

If anything, I’d say that you’re the one coming at this from a privileged position. The Democrats were actively supporting genocide, but you could just ignore and look past that.

I presume that is why you get yelled at - your priority this election was yourself and your opinions rather than trying to protect the safety of your fellow citizens.

This is even more nonsensical. “My opinions” are my best assessment of the best way of improving society and the world, including the safety of my fellow citizens. You’re essentially accusing me of putting my sense of morality above what’s right - but my sense of morality is what tells me what’s right. Your vote is equally based on your opinions. Utterly incoherent talking point.

Granted, this election was a bureaucratic mess, but choosing not to vote Biden/Harris in 2024 signaled to others where your loyalty was (or rather, wasn’t).

Yes, that’s part of why I did it. I have zero loyalty to the genocidal, Blue MAGA imperialists, I consider myself a citizen of the world and obviously that means not supporting genocide and imperialism.

Four bars is already too many, adding a big red line down the middle is not helping, and tbh if you took away the star it’d at least be symmetrical.

If your flag is gonna be busy, at least be creative and put like a dragon or something on it.

Sorry CAR.

The first step to finding a solution is to recognize that the existing tools are woefully insufficient. Suppose we didn’t have elections at all, suppose all we had was a monarchy where the only recourse within the system was to petition the king, to ask him nicely to act on our behalf. Should we still rely on that? Should we drop other approaches because they might sour the king’s mood?

With a little imagination, you can find that there are inherent mechanisms for asserting power that are not provided by the system and which exist regardless of the system’s best efforts to take them away. All systems are manmade and can be changed and dismantled if enough people stop cooperating with it. This does not have to look like a traditional revolution, with pitched battles and whatnot. Strikes, protests, development of mutual aid networks and dual power structures, even targeted boycotts can be more effective than voting for a candidate hand-picked by the ruling class.

The electoral system keeps people disorganized and divided, it directs energy away from those tactics instead of towards them. The idea that non-disruptive tactics could possibly someday produce change makes people unwilling to engage in tactics that are more disruptive, because nobody really likes being disruptive, taking risks, creating tension, but that tension is necessary to effect change.

The effect that electoral politics has on defining people’s political identities cannot be overstated. The moment you cast your vote, no matter how reluctant it may be, there will be a part of you that wants to justify and defend your choice and before you know it you’re now defending things that you never would otherwise. Nearly all political discourse becomes colored by this question of who to vote for. Again, think about how you would read news stories differently if you had no mechanism within the system for expressing your voice. But that is essentially where we’re at because the mechanisms provided by the system are ineffective, but while we have this idea that they could be effective, people still define themselves along those lines.

Let me give you an example. I live in a solidly blue state, previously, I lived in a solidly red state for most of my life. At no point has my vote for president had any impact on the outcome whatsoever. This is true for the vast majority of Americans. And yet, when I talk about my refusal to vote Harris or Biden, people yell at me, a lot. Why? It has no material impact. It’s because it’s primarily a cultural signifier, a way of defining a political identity, and any material consequences are of secondary consideration. So long as people are allowing bourgeois parties to shape and define their political identities, that’s going to dissuade them from engaging in direct action.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

Puritanical worldview

Feels like you’re maybe blowing this out of proportion just a little

Yeah, sometimes I feel like we should just get it over with and start global thermonuclear war for no reason too. Just end it all, you know?

un-Fieris your guy

I think the main thing to criticize is the fact that the news picked this one random person’s grievance to platform.

Would the news do the same if a cyclist complained that a road was unsafe for cyclists? A driver being upset, while an expert disagrees, is considered newsworthy. But I’d bet that if it was a random cyclist who was upset, even if the experts agreed with them, it wouldn’t make the news.

Oh no, did Lockheed Martin and the Pinkerton Detective Agency not change to a rainbow Twitter logo? The horror.

All shit like that accomplished was letting brands pinkwash their image, while the association caused harmed to queer people around the world. It’s hard to promote LGBT rights if your country is staring down bombs with rainbows painted on them. Meanwhile, those same companies would often materially support conservative politicians, while offering purely symbolic support for queer people.

“How does the Murder Factory feel about gay rights?” is looking at things with completely the wrong priorities. The world is better off with that bullshit image stripped away, even if it’s happening for the wrong reasons.

That’s a good point. The real problem is that the land and resources they stole through brazen force still remain in the hands of Western megacorps in a system of neocolonialism, and whenever any of the exploited countries try to tax or regulate that (much less reclaim their resources altogether), they get sanctioned into oblivion, if not overthrown outright.

Put it this way: I don’t think PJ is a fed, but I think the fact that he’s the feds aren’t paying him is wage theft.

Tbh I think people are trying to hard to dunk on you rather than actually explaining how we see things and why.

Opposing war is generally the correct take, in most cases, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should turn it into a hard rule, because there are exceptions. The American Civil War is an example I think most people would agree with. As violent and bloody as it was, it was still outweighed by the centuries of systemic violence baked into the system.

As Marxists we concern ourselves less with “who started it” (an inherently subjective question) and more with who’s fighting it and why, and what outcomes can be expected. War is the continuation of politics by other means, so to understand a conflict it’s important to look at the political questions at stake, on a case-by-case basis.

Without getting into the specifics of these conflicts, that’s what’s meant by “anti-war-ism,” not just opposing war, but doing so without really bothering to understand the specifics of a given conflict.

That’s still not as fast of a development, and the conditions aren’t really comparable. China used to be among the poorest countries in the world.

And while their government has not always been ideal, it was undoubtably the best option on the table historically. The corrupt Nationalists didn’t do shit for the people (and pocketed foreign aid). Before that, with no central authority, was the warlord period. Before that was the backwards Qing dynasty. In all the thousands of years of Chinese history, nobody really did anything for the rural people until the communists.

Marx… is convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid)

I’m sorry, what? Have you ever actually tried to read Capital? Most of Marx’s works are dense and academic, drawing intellectual traditions that are often unfamiliar to modern readers (classical economics, Hegel, etc). Marx’s way of argumentation isn’t really geared toward the lowest common denominator.

It’s kinda funny how you can’t even keep your criticism straight through a single comment. In one sentence, reading Marx is a “chore” that nobody would want to slog through, in the very next one, Marx is so persuasive, his honeyed words easily sway the minds of any who stumble across them, like the Sirens calling ships to their rocks.

As for “no good goal exists anymore” or “it’s hard to see what good goal tankies ever had” maybe we just like it when this sort of thing happens:

The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.

When you figure out a better way to do that, get back to me.

This is the absolute worst part of site culture, particularly on .world.

If you talk shit about another user or instance, then checking up on whether it’s actually true or not is not “following around and harassing” it’s just basic fact checking.

This is why I always say, “If someone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.” At the very least, it should be disregarded as hearsay. But somehow the culture is that people get to talk shit and if you check them on it you’re the bad guy. How anyone can stand that BS is beyond me.

I know, it’s absolutely tragic, the sacred flame of truth extinguished by the sinister, authoritarian mods, controlling the unwashed masses of users by keeping them ignorant of such enlightened comments as, “lol hexbear sux.”

Censorship! This is censorship of my free speech!