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Yes.
Anybody who says otherwise is likely (on some level) attempting to convince others to crush their hopes of a better world being possible.
No, it’s not possible with unlimited corporate “donations”.
Rs are left hand, Ds are right hand, AmazonEnronMega is the puppeteer.
They’ve made bribery legal, it’s blatant and right out in the open. They all shared the stage, everyone clapped, thunderous applause
Voters can’t out bribe them, they’re too busy trying to make a living on half the pay their parents had
How will you get them to outlaw bribery again? Not legally.
(see Super PACs and Citizens United)
That would imply nice things are possible. Surely you must choose between being against mexican rapist trans pet eaters or pro mexican rapist trans pet eaters as your 2 binary options.
Then vote in all elections including local, special, midterms and especially primaries not just general. Choose progressives.
We are where we are, because voter apathy. When you don’t vote, other pick the candidates for you.
from what I hear, depending on the state, it’s not easy to vote in the US.
- In some places you have to reregister beforehand and you don’t get a reminder
- sometimes the next place to vote is far away
- you have to bring a lot of papers
- the election is during workhours on like a tuesday
- there is a huge line and it’s sometimes really hot out
- even then sometimes they delete you from the list without notifying you
especially in southern states, primarily black neighborhoods districts have extra shitty conditions to prevent black people from voting
You are confusing cause and effect. We have voter apathy because we are where we are. The vote-harder contingent has never once shown that it works. Every single president has presided over mass murder of innocent civilians. Every single party has approved or failed to stop mass murder. There has not been a single victory over racialized mass incarceration in 70 years. The US imprisons more of its people than almost any other country, and has a parole system twice as big as its prison system, meaning it manages the lives 3x more people with its police force than any other country on earth. It’s unfathomably larger than anything the world has ever seen. It absolutely dwarfs the height of the GULAG system.
The system creates the apathy. The apathy doesn’t create the system.
And I saw your other comment that not-voting won’t make things better and that’s true, but voting also won’t make things better. So it’s time to start thinking about what will make things better and time to stop funneling energy into a known ineffective solution.
We have that voter apathy because our voting system is awful, and doesn’t allow most votes to even matter. People should still vote, but that alone isn’t enough to fix anything. As things are now it’s damage control at best.
It’s bad, especially in the US and Canada, but not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one, even if the systems are set up to look that way. Voting is always worth it.
Ultimately there are not hard-coded rules saying a progressive vote is worth less than a conservative one
There might not be rules explicitly for this purpose, but the Electoral College and Senate are hard-coded institutions in the US government that effectively guarantee this. The antagonism there is more framed as a rural vs urban one, but it effectively amounts to the same thing in practice. Going by Wikipedia numbers, every elector for NY represents the votes of up to 714,372 residents of New York, while in Wyoming, that ration is considerably lower, at 1 elector for every 196,251 residents. This ignores things like residents counted in the population who are ineligible to vote and people who just don’t, but you get the point. Ditto for the Senate, where some 10 million New Yorkers get the same representation as just under 300,000 people in Wyoming.
Yes, rural states could eventually swing left again and make this no longer the case, but it certainly seems unlikely at any time in the near future.
Problem is in a lot of places those with the D next to their name aren’t progressive with the only ones that actually are being third party. So not only do you have to convince a non-voter to vote, but you have to convince them to support someone that’s not part of the 2 major parties.
That’s why he called out primaries
Even in primaries there’s just not an option. In my area everyone just tries to get right wing votes, including the Dems with many straight up just calling themselves conservatives that don’t agree with the direction that party took. I’ve yet to see anyone every running to represent the party even on a small scale advocating for leftist values.
Exactly. Vote Green.
Wait is that Kang or Kronos
Maybe but not enough. Given gerrymandering and swing states. Do I wish my states politicians were progressive? Of course and I’ll keep voting for them. But when it comes to national politics, my states politicians are blue and that won’t change either way, and it will not be paid attention to because we’re not a swing state
As long as my state is balanced by another I can’t affect, nothing is changing. No matter how progressive we may be, there’s always a West Virginia voting against healthcare, education, technology, jobs, the environment, livable wages, more protective safety nets, etc
Now imagine more than two choices!
The UK also has 1st-past-the-post voting, yet polling is showing that people are rejecting their 2 big parties: Labour (liberal capitalists) and the Tories (sociopathic capitalists), in favor of Reform (psychotic capitalists) and the Green party (ethical environmentalists).
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
Living in Europe this is fairly easy te remember. None of the choices are great, but they definitely exist.
Yeah, it’s a choice among:
all out evil
Definitely evil, but still pretending to be good. (Weirdly,they’re the only capable party, and though at least half of the stuff they champion is awful, the amount of things they get done that aren’t evil is somehow still larger than whatever good any less evil party can get done. It’s still not worth it, to be clear, it’s just a shitty quirk of this political climate.)
Doesn’t yet realize they’re evil, but they are
Half good hearted but misguided, half foreign agents trying to sow discord
Great except for one issue, will never get a high portion of the vote
Great all around, will really never get a high portion of the vote
Guess the country and guess the parties for a sense of being quick on the uptake and in on the joke.
hint for the last two
I’m in favor of giving Ukraine weapons and pro European unity
My guess
Germany
- AfD
- CDU
- SPD
- BSW
- The Left
- Greens
Pretty close- maybe I should have mentioned being bitter about our anachronistic coal usage in the spoiler. I didn’t include BSW, so it goes afd, cdu, spd, greens, die linke, and volt, though I would also put BSW in that category with the greens
Sooooo… which half of the Greens are “foreign agents trying to sow discord”?
Would be my guess as well, though I’m unsure about the CDU/CSU getting more good stuff done than other less shitty parties. The last administration did pretty well mostly thanks to the Greens even though the media kept bashing it to no end, and I do not want to imagine a world with a CxU/SPD coalition during the chaos after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Also I think The Left is far less likely to get a significant share of votes than the Greens.
Imagine countless choices depending on the topic at hand, so that we didn’t have stale boomers making decisions regarding the internet or young people’s futures!
Protest and elect. Emphasis on protest.
- Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
- Organize, network, focus on building solidarity.
- Vote at primaries for the most progressive candidate.
- Don’t punch down
- Don’t punch left.
All important, but those last two are key to enabling the rest imo
- Don’t punch left.
Naw. If there’s somebody on our side doing fucked-up shit, I’m calling it out.
The problem is, a lot of liberals think that criticising democrats for being pro-genocide is “fucked-up shit”. Like, refusing to support a genocidal politician is worse than actually supporting a genocide to some people.
if you are at a protest and the police are not instructed to intervene, you know that the protest is performative. bring allot of people with guns. a protest is only as effective as the leverage it demands.
bring allot of people with guns.
Sounds like a great way to depress turnout. If I hear the protest is going to have a lot of people with guns, then I’m not going to that protest. You know the cops have guns, too, right?
that is unfortunate, because otherwise a protest is easily ignored and pushed around, and is only useful in placating the people as a means to think they are making a difference without inconveniencing those who would harm the nation.
especially when the media is adversarial to your cause.
What do you think will happen if you bring guns?
Protests are an opening offer.
If you aren’t willing to escalate, then they’re meaningless.
Protests are also networking events, where you show the public that opposition exists and is welcome to new members.
We started as five people in a rural coffee shop last year, and now we’re over 100, with the majority of the new members joining at protest events after saying “Oh wow, I’ve been commuting because I didn’t think there would be resistance here!”
Ranked Choice Voting.
Where we don’t just have to hold our noses and pick from 2. https://represent.us/A video about it- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k
You know what’s even better? Proportional representation and an executive branch that answers directly to your elected parliament.
Ranked choice or STV just means you continue to vote against Republicans and hope for the second worst option of Democrats, but you can feel better about yourself because you put a left-wing party down as your first choice.
STV should only be used for figurehead positions with no real power.
RCV still has some flaws although of course it is infinitely better than FPTP. Ireland continues to be held in the grasp of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Approval voting seems to be the best according to most scholars on the topic.
Ranked Choice has a Monotonicity problem. i.e. it’s possible for a candidate to lose if a more people rank that candidate higher on their own ballot without changing any other ballots.
This has happened in recent RCV elections, and resulted in the candidate’s ideological opposition winning.
There’s a group called FairVote that’s been pushing RCV since the early 90s despite the many flaws of the system. Flaws that have been known since the system was first designed in 1788.
Seriously, Instant Runoff Voting was invented by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1788 as an example of a broken election system that can eliminate candidates preferred by a majority of voters.
It was later reinvented in the late 1850s by an Englishman who presumably never learned French.
Anyway a modern voting system for consideration is STAR, it was developed in 2014 by people who have read Condorcet, the the works of Kenneth Arrow from the 1950s. (Arrow’s Impossibility Theorium)
Find more info at www.equal.vote
STAR and Ranked Robin both are a form of RCV. Most people are familiar with RCV so I feel it’s easier to sell the whole concept under the RCV label and then just directing people to the Equal Vote Coalition, like you did, which does a great job of explaining the nuances.
Seriously though, STAR or Ranked Robin are the best choices if we want more progressive wins overall.
Regular RCV is weighted more towards center with a higher chance of the least liked candidate winning compared to STAR or Ranked Robin although less than our current system.
Even RCV is still leagues better than what we currently have and it still shows the actual support numbers for progressive politicians and policies. However, if we’re making a final choice, I’d be happy with STAR = Ranked Robin > Score Voting > Ranked Choice Voting >>>>>>>> First Past the Post (The current system in most of the US).
STAR and Ranked Robin are definitively not RCV.
RCV, or IRV as it’s known elsewhere in the world, is an Ordinal voting system. That means spoiler effect and enforced two party dominance.
STAR and Ranked Robin are on the Cardinal side of things. No spoiler effect, because votes you can give equal support to multiple candidates.
If I really like two different candidates and don’t particularly care which one wins, I can say that on a STAR or Ranked Robin ballot.
In RCV I have to make a strategic choice, and if I get that choice wrong, it’s not just my guy who loses, but possibly my entire side.
So no, they are not the same. And it’s worse because of RCV’s lack of Monotonicity.
Non-negative responsiveness or monotonicity is a property of a social choice rule, which says that increasing a candidate’s rank on some ballots should not cause them to lose (or vice versa, that decreasing a candidate’s rank should not cause them to win).[1] This means rankings can be interpreted as ordering candidates from best to worst, with higher ranks corresponding to more support. Voting systems that violate non-negative responsiveness can be said to exhibit negative response,[2][3] perversity,[4] or an additional support paradox.[5]
And then explicitly;
Runoff-based voting systems such as ranked choice voting (RCV) are typically vulnerable to negative response. A notable example is the 2009 Burlington mayoral election, the United States’ second instant-runoff election in the modern era, where Bob Kiss won the election as a result of 750 ballots ranking him in last place.[16] Another example is given by the 2022 Alaska at-large special election.
So no, RCV is actually somehow worse than First Past the Post.
Also, that rule about needing more than 50% of the vote? Yeah, that too is a lie. Ballot exhaustion means that it’s 50% of the ballots that are left in the final round. If you didn’t guess correctly who made it to the final round, your ballot is just thrown away. It’s called ballot exhaustion.
Another popular lie is that your vote transfers in order on your ballot. It transfers in order to the candidates who are left. That’s why Bob Kiss won from being ranked last on various ballots. The people before him were eliminated before the first name on the ballot, so the vote skipped a bunch of names and transferred from the first name to the last.
All this because when you hold an RCV election, what you’re really doing is just holding a series of First Past the Post elections on the same ballot. You can’t fix the problems of First Past the Post by repeating First Past the Post a bunch of times.
I agree completely, they’re much better for all of the reasons you stated. I’m saying they’re Ranked Choice in a dumbed down sense, because it’s a bit too complicated for many people to really grasp the specifics. You are still functionally giving your choices a rank, and that’s the easy to explain part for most people to get about STAR and Ranked Robin. So I’m making an appeal to something most people are familiar with already to really sell the two other systems.
I’d say it’s important to use the word “rating” when talking about STAR. This is actually by design. Introduce it to people by saying “Give the politician an honest rating 0-5 stars”. And if they’re all rated as ones and zeroes, I don’t see a problem.
STAR can also be in a ranked format as well, with Ranked STAR being mathematically equivalent to regular STAR, but I agree that regular STAR leans more towards a rating structure.
STAR uses ratings, not Rankings. There is Ranked Robin, but that’s not STAR.
Ranked Robin has more complexity in the count, but the good thing is that it always elects the Condorcet winner, because he sort of invented the system. Well, an early version. Ranked Robin is the formalized modern version, and you could argue that since equal ranks are allowed in Ranked Robin, it’s closer to ratings.
I used the word formalized because STAR and Ranked Robin both have specific written procedures for the ballot appearance, the counting, and basically everything else you need to run an election using the system.
It makes adoption easier when you don’t have to design anything, just follow directions for a fairly representative election.
STAR voting is slightly better in a couple of situations but yeah, that would be real progress
Was about to comment. It’s actually better in most situations. Also, we wouldn’t need to redesign our counting/tally infrastructure and machines.
I would love to be in a position to pick the worse if these two!
And to get to that local elections are very important.
People think that the general election every 4 years is the most important one, but all the other elections shape who will be on the ballot.
It’s time to give up on this idea, given the outrage culture, the death of journalism.
We could have a race of Fred Roger’s vs fred rogers and someone would find or make up a scandal and half the internet will follow. For the foreseeable future all candidates appear to be evil, whether they are different from before or not, so our choice is who appears less evil.
Then there’s the death of the platform. Candidates compete to see how little they can say, to not give their opponents anything to go on, so all future candidates will not appear to have a good platform and our choice is who is less evil
We could have Fred Rogers vs Bob Ross…
But we don’t. We have genocidaires vs genocidaires. We have kids-in-cages champions vs kids-in-cages apologists. We have mass incarceration with racial undertones vs mass incarceration with racial overtones.
There is absolutely no manufacturing of the perception of evil needed. Every single American leader at that level going back as far as the eye can see is basically competing to see how many people they can kill and torture.
Stop lying
Stop fighting on behalf of a white supremacist genocidal juggernaut. Let’s go with your heroes.
Thomas Jefferson - not just a slave owner, a slave breeder and for profit serial rapist. Raped people that he owned as property, took their babies from them, and sold the babies. Kept a very young slave girl in a cave in his bedroom with no windows and only the one door so he could rape her whenever he wanted. He tried to use his political power to end the transatlantic slave trade specifically to increase the price he could charge for slaves that were born on his plantations.
George Washington - order the genocide of indigenous people all over the colonies. Order Sullivan not only to kill every single Indian he saw but also to destroy every single source of food, every orchard, every farm plot, every single way the Indians could eat. Literally called “village destroyer” by the indigenous peoples because he ordered them all killed and burned to the ground.
Abraham Lincoln - famously abolished slavery? Nope. The Emancipation Proclamation only offered freedom to those enslaved peoples of the 11 rebelling states and only if they took up arms against the rebels. Slavery was left intact in the union and up to the states to decide by vote. Lincoln himself is on record stating that he didn’t care much whether slavery was legal or not. He just cared about stopping the rebellion. He is also on record saying that blacks and white probably couldn’t ever live together and that he thought the slaves should all go back to Africa.
Harry Truman - worked closely with the Vatican in Operation Paperclip to save almost 10k Nazis from suffering the consequences of losing the war. Gave them fake identities, money, safe passage, new lives, jobs, and integrated some of them into the workings of the US empire. He also oversaw the Korean War where the USA bombed the north until there were literally no buildings left and dropped so much napalm that Koreans in the North needed to live in caves because there was nowhere else to protect themselves from a chemical fire that bonded to human flesh and caused one of the most gruesome torturous deaths we know of. Oh. He also is the only human being to ever order the dropping of an atomic bomb. He did it twice, against densely populated cities, and while Japan was literally in the diplomatic process of negotiating a surrender with the US.
FDR - Concentration camps for anyone looking vaguely Japanese, including the state seizure of their property
Also, the US was a literal apartheid state until the 1960s.
I could go on. Every president since Reagan is super easy to expose as drenched in blood.
Thats basically communism and socialism for me. I believe socialism would be better but its two goods either way.
So you believe that a dictatorship of capital, wielding the power of state violence to suppress its enemies and plan the economy, is better than a stateless, classless, moneyless society? Basically what you’re saying is that USSR was the absolute peak of societal development, and while I do like many faucets of USSR I will disagree here.
No meaningful difference
I dont think humanity has advanced enough to not conspire against each other, no matter the org chart.
That’s true, but socialism is more democratic.
I’d be willing to take the worse of two goods at this point.
Texas just had to choose between Talarico and Crockett. Both sounded like great candidates to me and hope that Crockett can continue her path in politics (albeit without the AIPAC issue she has)
To be fair, that is how primaries work. In many states only people registered with the party can pick who ends up at the binary vote. Which forces people to denigrate themselves by capitulating to a party in order to be allowed to run in their primary and get money.
Just pointing out that Texas IS one of those states where only people registered with the party can vote in the primaries…
Really? Last I heard, Paxton was working on closing the primaries, but all of the reporting this week says open primaries.
I might be working off old info, haven’t been in Texas for over a decade.
In California the open primary allows everyone to vote for anyone. Last time that left us with 2 Democrats running for the final, but this year there are so many people splintering the Democratic voters, we could wind up with 2 Republicans.
lol, that’s exactly how Schwarzenegger ended up governor. The ballot had 135 people on it.
That had nothing to do with an open primary. There was no primary. All you had to do was pay a fee to get on the ballot. That’s why you see multiple Democrats, Republicans, etc. If there had been a primary, it wouldn’t have been such a circus, but the recall had different rules than a normal election.
What I meant is that it functioned similarly to an open primary, but yeah, I see your point. Sorry, it’s been 23 years since I saw the ballot until I just found it on wikipedia. What a shitshow that was.
Harm reduction. If forced into a binary choice, I’d rather lose a finger than lose a hand.
Sure, but at some point ya gotta think, “Maybe I should destroy the de-limbing machine,” instead of continuing to put part of your body in there.
(This isn’t a criticism of you or your beliefs, just a jokey perspective.)
i guess we need rage, rage against the delimbing machine?
Dont go slowly into the night. Rage. Rage against the machine
Democrats are organizing for the midterms. Add your voice somewhere it counts. The opinions of volunteers and contributors have much more influence than nihilistic comments on an internet chat board
Oh the same Democrats that have voted to continue baby killing sanctions, baby killing war, baby killing genocide, baby killing border policies, and baby killing capitalist policies? Those Democrats? The ones that put kids in solitary confinement even though it’s defined as a literal crime against humanity? The Democrats that have voted with Republicans to maintain mass incarceration for the last 50 years? The Democrats who think Nazis and the KKK should have freedom of speech? The Democrats that can do literally nothing to stop the known fascistic threat that they all literally said was coming and the the SCOTUS gave them a ruling to protect the president from doing something about it and they just rolled over and watched it happen?
Those Democrats? Yeah. News flash. They are one input chute into the delimbing machine. There is one delimbing machine and it has two openings. They both go to the grinder.
No. Thanks.
I don’t live in the US. I wouldn’t say it’s a Nihilistic comment to suggest fixing the system, though.
I mean yeah obviously
Sure, if you have any control over the situation.
Yes, if only you had a list of everybody who was running, from all parties (or even no party at all!) Then you could research each one, and then indicate the one you liked the best. Maybe by putting a mark next to their name or something.
That’s not what we’re talking about here. The “de-limbing machine” is the two-party system, and destroying it would mean ending first-past-the-post. An individual voter does not have the power to do that.
At some point, you will run out of fingers…
Some of y’all are taking this analogy too far and missing the point
No, I think you missed the point.
Yes, I missed the point of the thing that I said and which I set clear stipulations on. Indeed.
Everyone is talking about ranked choice and other options, I don’t have problems with that, but I’d like to say this:
I think if 80-90% of people voted for that lesser evil, then the greater evil would know that they have no chance, and shift themselves to get more votes. Either the candidate will change policies, or the party will dump those candidates and get someone new.
Problem is, both evils have equal chances of winning, so they have no reason to change significantly.
That’s what surprises me. Why’s the split 50/50 (±2% max)
Why’s the split 50/50 (±2% max)
Same corporations bankrolling them.
I mean why are people supporting the parties in 50/50 manner.
Because the parties are part of a long standing and every effective divide and conquer strategy.
The goal of the ruling class is to create a cross-class coalition so that the ruled-class supports the ruling class. This is impossible to do as a whole, so you have to divide the ruled-class against itself and then get one side of the ruled-class to side with the ruling-class on the basis of that division.
The 50/50 split is actively cultivated. It’s a sign that the parties are doing exactly what their job is and doing it very well.
I don’t know, but I absolutely support any attempt to find out.
I think a lot of people relate to that feeling. Most people don’t just want the “least bad” option — they’d rather feel like they’re choosing something genuinely good.
