this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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I feel like you're misunderstanding my view here. What I'm trying to say is that I believe if Trump gets the position then we'll be so busy fighting things at home that we won't have time to think about foreign affairs. If anybody else gets into the white house then we at least have a chance that further protests could make an impact on Washington. This isn't a both-sides thing, I really feel there could be a real difference to what happens in Palestine depending on who gets elected. Plus we already know that Trump has pledged support to Russia and vowed to immediately stop all aid to Ukraine, so supporting him just means double the genocide. Somebody is losing no matter how we vote, I'm just hoping we can make it so fewer people lose. Hoping for anything more at this point just feels unrealistic?
Dude, it was just a casual observation that sometimes things can change even when the whole government seems to be working against you. I'm not saying we're going to topple the two-party chokehold easily, but every little bit that we can chip away at it is a win. Colorado is probably the exception to the rule, we have enough influential people here who actually care about these things, and our state constitution demands that anything voted for on a ballot must be put into law. We had a right-leaning governor when the marijuana vote came through, he was hard against this but he didn't have a choice and had to find a way to legalize it. The RCV option is another thing that was solidly voted for recently, so they have to implement it. And yes, the current governor is slow-walking it but he does have some good reasons -- there are a lot of eyes on this and if we do it wrong then everyone else will just point at us and say it can't possibly work anywhere else either. Case in point -- we recently tried to have a vote on state-sponsored medical coverage, and all the objections against it were that another state tried this (poorly) and it failed. As I said, there are some influential people here keeping an eye on things, they won't let anyone just forget about the RCV mandate, and I'm happy to wait a few years if they can make sure we don't just become another bad example of a failed experiment. When something gets done right, people in other states put pressure on their officials, which comes back to my MJ example again, and now we have at least 29 states with some form of acceptance even while most people in politics are still fighting against it.
I guess my point here is that the government in general likes to steamroll citizens with slow, incremental changes so we hardly notice. Some of our issues (like telling Israel to fuck off) require immediate action, even if it's just picking the lesser of two evils so we can keep some doors open that might allow us to demand a change in policies. However other issues, like the way we vote, can be changed incrementally. Yes they're going to notice that they are starting to lose power, but once that ball starts rolling it's hard to stop it (although they could do something drastic like inciting a civil war and declaring martial law). It might happen, it might not, but the ball has at least started rolling in the right direction.
Man, I really thought things were going okay.
This is ridiculous. You have a Democrat in charge right now! You see the nothing that protests are doing! Kamala is the current President's VP and has come out swinging declaring such protests antisemitic and supportive of terrorism! You've let people talk you into a position that would only make sense speculatively, but we have the concrete reality right now and for the past nine months and it tells us that things don't work like that!
It's arguably a mistake on my part to respond to this at all, but I still will: Russia is not committing genocide and has no intention to do so. Ukrainian nationalists love to cry genocide, but it's nonsense. It's part of a cottage industry of hysterical headlines made to drum up support for the militarization of Europe and, in some cases, the direct arming of neo-nazis.
This is something that really disgusts me because of all of the brutality the US inflicts on the world, and the disproportionate reaction from white audiences to a white country getting invaded for the first time in a couple of decades.
Some people might conclude that if you've talked yourself into supporting an open genocider on the basis that anyone else is "unrealistic", the more appropriate action instead of hemming and hawing about who to vote for is to work to do whatever is necessary to smash the system, something that is not a question of voting. Just worth thinking about.
This is just you imagining a path to victory in which the opponent is functionally helpless to stop you, like playing chess against yourself, despite that power historically and currently being in a position of monstrous dominance. You sidestepped my counter here while trying to use it as evidence. This is the whole game, this isn't just some concession that those old farts are unhappy about giving, this is turning over and surrendering their belly for the people to tear into. Are you not familiar with what the US has done abroad to depose democratically elected leaders? Do you think that if a movement gained traction here that they somehow couldn't ratfuck like Bernie, that they would so much as hesitate to pull the trigger?
They wouldn't.